ALBANY — Introducing the hyper-famous virtuoso banjoist Bela Fleck alongside her at The Egg’s (small, nearly full) Swyer Theatre on Friday, banjoist Abigail Washburn proudly noted that he considers himself the “second chair banjoist” in her multi-cultural Sparrow Quartet.

The famed Fleck generally leads the bands he plays in, so it takes a powerful concept to earn his sideman support. In a dizzyingly disparate virtuoso display, Washburn (red dress, curly hair) and Fleck, cellist Ben Sollee and violinist Casey Driessen (all three all in black, with light ties) brought her concept to vivid life.

The “Overture” from the quartet’s new album spread out a Technicolor musical palette, intense playing spiced with Washburn’s yodeling — like Dvorak getting the blues on a wagon train to a hoedown, past the honky-tonks, on the other side of Beijing.

The effect of this United Nations musical mixed metaphor was “Wow!” — way more than “What?!”

When Washburn sang a Sichuan love song in Chinese, promising that “under the moonlight, things happen,” nobody needed a translation, and Fleck’s fantastic solo — clipped notes full of urgency — didn’t grab the spotlight from her since her vocal swelled to sky-filling force. She did share her fans’ adulation with the boys: Fleck fluently charged through the linked episodes of a Tanzanian folksong, solo and sizzling. After Driessen’s crisply syncopated solo turn, Fleck exclaimed, “That was bad-ass!” — a description most solos earned all night. Sollee’s “I Don’t Know Why” featured strummed cello and a persuasive, low-key vocal.

Even skeptics who think one banjo is too many and two absolutely redundant would have been impressed with how well Fleck and Washburn played together, sometimes on the same beat, in harmony; other times in slickly alternating runs. She played plain clawhammer style while he did his usual post-Scruggs thumb-and-three-fingers roll, surging into double- or triple-time whenever he wanted.

Much of the music occupied a singular space between Chinese folk and folkie forms of American pre-country. Unlikely combinations always fit. Fleck only once looked up after a particularly fiery run, with a “look-at-me” glance; otherwise the music was ego-less, played with great dash and precision, and efficiently revolving around Washburn’s ideas and skills.

After the break, Washburn dazzled in “He Keeps His Eye on the Sparrow” like a New Orleans funeral march: slow and solemn at first, then swinging in high gear. She whispered and belted and amazed. Fleck said some songs don’t click right away, then you fall in love with them, warning the next tune would not be like that. Proudly eccentric, “Sugar & Pie” wandered and wobbled like a late-sixties stoner jug-band ramble, but the band didn’t just indulge Washburn: They threw themselves headlong into it.

Abigail Washburn is redundant: a great expressive singer, a skillful banjoist, brilliant, beautiful and fearless — and she gives all this to her music.

Reach Michael Hochanadel at hochanadel@dailygazette.net.