The legendary New York jazz club, Blue Note, will host six days of jazz/bluegrass fusion next month. Bill Evans’ Soulgrass is booked January 23-28, with Sam Bush on mandolin and Tony Trischka on banjo. They join noted jazz saxophonist Evans with Dave Wecki on drums, Richard Bona on bass and Christian Howes on fiddle.

Evans’ jazz pedigree is pristine, having recorded and performed with Miles Davis in the 1980s. The notion of mixing jazz and bluegrass spun around in his mind for some time, coming to fruition with the 2005 Soulgrass CD, which featured Bela Fleck, Stuart Duncan, Jerry Douglas and Sam Bush along with Evans and such prominent jazzers as John Scofield and Mark Egan.

“I’ve been an Americana fan ever since my Miles days. I liked the sound of mandolin, banjo, dobro and fiddle and I thought that music had a very cool rhythmic approach, even though I never really knew the names of the players or the tunes. I had been listening to some Americana and bluegrass stuff for quite some time. I had some Bill Monroe CDs at home as well as recordings by Bruce Hornsby, the Flecktones, Sam Bush, Mark O’Conner. Music of that genre was very inspiring to me. Bluegrass and jazz are very similar in so many ways. As a jazz musician, it’s all just a different way to improvise and express yourself. I find it very exciting to combine both kinds of music. It is a dream of mine to play on stage at the Blue Note with all these great musicians and create some totally new music!”

Samples of Soulgrass can be heard on the Bill Evans site. Full details on the show can be found on the Blue Note web site.

If you are looking for something to do this New Year’s Eve, here’s an option you might consider. Garrison Keillor, from A Prairie Home Companion, will be hosting a live New Year’s Eve broadcast from the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville. The Ryman seating is already sold out, but the broadcast is part of the PBS Great Performances series and will be carried on Public Television channels nationwide (check your local listing).

The program will also be available online starting at 9:30 PM CST from the A Prairie Home Companion website.

Keillor will host the telecast featuring regulars from his show such as “sound effects guy” Fred Newman, Rich Dworsky, Guy’s All-Star Shoe Band, and others. In addition to the A Prairie Home Companion series regulars, this special event will also spotlight some of bluegrass music’s shining stars. Doyle Lawson & Quicksilver and Rhonda Vincent & The Rage are both set to perform as part of the evening’s festivities. My understanding is that each of them will perform an entire set as part of the evenings festivities. Put it on your calendar now.

Bluegrass musicians and actors in or near the Big Apple may be interested in this.

Phare Play Productions has issued a casting call for their production of Dark Of The Moon, by Howard Richardson and William Berney. The period piece, set in the Appalachian region of North Carolina in the 1930s, will run at the Lodestar Theater on 9th Avenue in New York City from February 23 to March 18, 2007.

Auditions will be held January 6 at Producers’ Club Theatres in New York, by appointment, from 11:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m.

POSSIBLE INSTRUMENTS NEEDED: Guitar, fiddle, banjo, autoharp, dobro, mandolin, spoons, washboard, mouth organ, jews harp, ukulele, any instrument that could be used in a mountain community playing bluegrass and Depression-era folk.

ALL MUSICIANS MUST ACT AND SING. Please bring a two minute contemporary monologue, prepare 16 bars of a cappella gospel/bluegrass/period folk as well as 16 bars to play on your instrument.

Contact Kymm Zuckert at Phare Play (with head shot/resume) to obtain an appointment for an audition. This is a non-equity, community theater production, and all parts are cast on a non-paid basis.

This weekend’s Knee Deep In Bluegrass show with Cindy Baucom is, as one might expect, her annual Christmas edition. This year, the Christmas show will feature a very special co-host, Cindy’s husband, Terry Baucom, banjo man with Doyle Lawson & Quicksilver.

Cindy and Terry will spend the two hour program playing their favorite bluegrass Christmas music, and sharing Christmas memories with several of their friends in the world of bluegrass. Dropping in for the show will be Terry Eldridge, Molly Cherryholmes, Dee Sparks, Vince Gill and Sammy Shelor, among others.

The show airs in nearly 100 radio markets, and a list of affiliates can be found on the Knee Deep In Bluegrass web site if you want find out where to catch the show in your area.

We posted last week that the music video for Chris Thile’s Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground was available on CMT.com. We also mentioned that Mac users were out of luck when it came to accessing CMT’s video player, and that Sugar Hill was likely to post the video on its YouTube page before long.

And so they have. You can view the music video, shot in New York City this past summer, on the Sugar Hill YouTube page.

Here’s a show you may want to hurry up and buy tickets for if you are able to attend. Mountain Stage, in Charleston, WV, will be taping a live show on Sunday, February 11th, 2007 featuring J.D. Crowe & The New South, Doyle Lawson & Quicksilver, The Greencards, and Mindy Smith. The show will be held at the Creative Arts Center on the campus of WVU in Morgantown, WV.
Tickets are on sale now at $15 or at the door for $20. You can call the CAC box office at 304-293-SHOW or purchase them through TicketMaster (at least that’s what the Mountain Stage website says, I couldn’t find the event on TicketMaster).

There is an entire sub-genre of bluegrass, referred to as Jewgrass, performed by Jewish musicians around the country. A recent Harvard grad even wrote an award winning scholarly piece about the history of such music and I’ll be publishing an interesting story about that soon.

But as we are in the holiday season it seemed appropriate to highlight some music I just discovered in this genre. I recently came across a band from Silver Spring, Maryland calling themselves the Sinai Mountain Boys. This band is comprised of four Orthodox Jewish musicians who blend the sounds of bluegrass with Chassidic and other Jewish melodies.

I discovered this band on a blog belonging to a brother of one of the band members. The author had highlighted a song his brother performed for the Jewish holiday of Hanukkah. Very cool.

Click over to hear the Sinai Mountain Boys perform a “Jewgrass” version of Oh Hanukkah.

AT&T’s blue room has posted a set of online videos of Chris Thile and How To Grow A Band performing live in their studio.

Three songs from his How To Grow A Woman From The Ground CD are included - Watch ‘at Breakdown, Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground and the title track - plus Song For A Young Queen from his Not All Who Wander Are Lost release, and fiddler Gabe Witcher’s brilliant version of Ophelia, which they have been featuring in the stage show.

There are also three interview segments where Chris discusses his musical influences, his new project and band, and the demise of Nickel Creek.

Find all of the performance and interview videos on AT&T blue room. Click on the Live Performances tab to find the Chris Thile link.

Thanks to Fielding Logan for tipping us to the Thile videos.

With the holidays quickly approaching John and I have decided to forgo further podcasts until after the first of year. The interviews are a great deal of work and with both of us traveling for Christmas with our families it seemed like a good time for a break.

We would like to hear from our readers/listeners though. Tell us know what you think of the GrassCast. Let us hear from you if you enjoy it and what you like about it. If you are a regular, or semi-regular, reader and don’t listen to the GrassCast please let us hear from you as well. We’re curious as to why you don’t listen and what we could do differently to encourage you to do so.

The Roots Music Report is an online resource that reports radio play charts for a number of “roots” genres including bluegrass. Their charts are compiled based on playlists submitted by the stations/DJs. It looks fairly easy to sign up to report your playlist if you are a DJ or station manager, and I would encourage you to do so.

The charts they now have available, like this bluegrass chart, are nation wide reports. The company has announced that in January 2007 they will be launching state specific charts for a number of states including California, Tennessee, Illinois, and New York. The goal is to eventually represent all 50 states with individual radio airplay charts. This should be a great way for artists and labels to see how much their music is being played in specific geographic regions of the country. I would think that comparing the results of the state charts to the national one should be interesting.

It sounds like a lot of work, but it should be quite a resource for the professionals in our industry to track how their music is being distributed on radio.

We got a note recently from Abe Wechter at Wechter Guitars about their new Plek fret dressing machine which they use to set up new guitars prior to shipping. The device is a German-made, computer-assisted apparatus that does a detailed virtual imaging of the neck while the instrument is strung up to pitch.

Plek describes their process as follows:

The scan generates many graphic images, complete with extensive dimensional data regarding the neck, fingerboard, frets, strings, nut and bridge. In other words, it allows you to choose and view any aspect of the neck, frets and strings in detail while providing measurements of everything. The technician can then do a virtual fret dress on the computer monitor, applying any of the usual preferences and styles that go into an ideal fret dress for that instrument.

Then, when this virtual fret dress is ready, the loosened strings are moved to the side of the neck so that the Plek can dress and shape the frets. The Plek then does that exact fret dress extremely accurately and referenced to its original scan so that, when restrung, the fret plane is level, the relief is ideal and the finished fret shape is very consistent. All of this is done to tolerances as tight as .0004in., far more accurate than manual work and consistent every time.

Wechter says that they use their Plek Pro to file frets, cut nuts and trim saddles on all new guitars. The Plek can also be used to set personalized, custom string height and playability preferences for existing Wechter guitar owners.

More details are available on the Plek web site.

Marion, VA is a town you might miss, unless you are traveling on I-81 through Virginia’s Blue Ridge mountains. The area has a rich musical heritage, however, and is now the home of Song Of The Mountains, a live concert series which is recorded for broadcast television from Marion’s restored Lincoln Theater.

The show is the brainchild of Tim White, a well-known performer and radio personality in East Tennessee (Troublesome Hollow and The VW Boys), and Andre Burroughs, Production Manager at Blue Ridge Public Television in Roanoke, VA. They launched in the summer of 2005, drawing a local audience and filming several of the shows for airing on BRPTV.

These shows were also offered to PBS affiliates all over the US, and 26 picked the show up over the course of that first season. In 2006, shows were recorded for the 2007 broadcast season, and the show received a Telly Award for their work in season one.

The 2007 broadcast season will include live shows featuring Jesse McReynolds & The Virginia Boys, The Lost & Found, Roni Stoneman, The VW Boys with special guest “Tater” Tate, Mike Seeger, Paul Williams & the Victory Trio, Randy Waller & the Country Gentlemen, Wayne Henderson & Jeff Little, Heather Berry & Dominion Grass and many others.

Tim White tells us that they have 50 PBS affiliate stations carrying the show now, and that it is distributed for broadcast to members of the National Educational Telecommunications Association through the NETA Program Service.

Stations wishing to contact Tim for more information can do so by email.

Dollywood has announced the dates and locations for their 2007 audition tour. These auditions are for singers, actors, musicians, dancers, technicians and specialty acts who are interested in employment at the park during the 2007 season (March 31-December 30). They are looking for singers and instrumentalists familiar with country, bluegrass, 50’s and 60s’ pop or musical theater.

The auditions will be held in several cities during the first two weeks on January to give as many potential performers as possible an opportunity to showcase for the audition panel.

More details, including audition site addresses, audition and employment requirements, and salary information can be found on the Dollywood Employment web site.

I’ve been watching the latest round of campaign ads by the candidates that are running for Mayor of Bluegrass and I’ve got a couple comments.

First of all Trent Dobbins. This guy is an importer of organic salmon? He’s pretty scary looking if you ask me. I wouldn’t eat anything this guy tried to sell me! And is it just me, or does he sound a little bit like Ernest T. Bass? You can watch his two campaign ads here and here.

Now about Wichita. His ads are well done as expected. He is, after all, a podcasting superstar and has some experience being in front of the camera what with the Van Heffer thing and all. My only question is this, who is the announcer in those ads? It almost sounds like the guy that does the voice over at the beginning of the western Tombstone. I don’t think it is, but his voice is similar and very impressive sounding. You can see his ads here and here.

I’m going to have to come out in support of Wichita in this election. If you are still on the fence be sure to listen to the Lester Flatt interview I mentioned earlier, it might change your mind.

Links to the ads on Wichita’s Blog

• First Round
• Second Dobbins Ad
• Second Rutherford Ad

We have posted many times recently about Grasstowne, this fall’s big bluegrass start-up featuring Alan Bibey, Steve Gulley and Phil Leadbetter.

This week’s news is that the band has signed a 3 CD deal with Pinecastle Records, with work on the first expected to begin just after the new year. They hope to have it out by June of 2007.

Both Phil and Alan were interviewed about the new band this month on The GrassCast. You can hear these interviews online, in your web browser, by visiting The GrassCast page.

As strange as it may sound, Wichita Rutherford has a podcast up over at his blog that features an interview with Lester Flatt. I won’t go into detail explaining how he got the chance to do the interview, but let’s just say Wichita may have had a bigger hand in shaping bluegrass music than we previously realized!

Listen to the interview here.

The bluegrass trading season is in full swing and The Dale Ann Bradley Band has acquired new members in the recent trades. Dale Ann has gathered together some great bluegrass musicians to put together her new high powered band.

The first bit of news is that mandolin player and tenor singer Jeff Parker has left Lonesome River Band to join Dale Ann. Jeff’s mandolin style and soaring vocals should nicely complement Dale Ann’s music.

Brought in to nail down the low end of the music, award winning bass player, Mike Bub, has joined the band on upright bass. Bub played bass for years in The Del McCoury Band, winning numerous IBMA Bass Player of the Year awards. Mike also contributed baritone vocals to the McCoury mix and one hopes that Dale Ann will take advantage of his singing in her new band.

Banjo player Ramona Church has also joined Dale Ann, creating an opening in Big Country Bluegrass which has been filled by Lynwood Lunsford.

In addition to these changes, Troy Engle is now playing fiddle with the band. The band website also indicates that he may play some guitar from time to time. The site also continues to lists Deanie Richardson on fiddle. Will we hear some twin fiddling?

This is quite a line up and Dale Ann appears to agree.

I feel like I’m starting a new musical life with this entourage. And that’s just the truth. With the musical talent of these folks, along with their personal character & their true dedication to making this musical unit as good as it can be, I have nothing but the highest hopes for all five of us.

John McGann is one of acoustic string music’s more prolific instrumentalists and educators. He is the 1985 national mandolin champion, and has performed and recorded with a who’s who of bluegrass, newgrass, celtic and folk artists. He operates his own custom transcription service, and has five books published by Mel Bay. John is a popular instructor at both guitar and mandolin camps, and is an Associate Professor in Strings at the Berklee College of Music where he teaches mandolin.

His newest contribution is John McGann’s Rhythm Mandolin, an instructional DVD designed to introduce mandolinists to a number of ways to accompany others, from the familiar bluegrass chop to Celtic and swing styles. The more aggressive right hand approach used in progressive bluegrass is covered, as are old time and Texas “sock rhythm” styles.

John uses the familiar fiddle tune Forked Deer to present these many examples and stylistic variations.

The DVD does not include a printed booklet, but has a PDF book on the DVD itself. Simply insert the DVD into your computer and you can view and/or print the booklet which features transcriptions (tab and standard) and chord charts for the examples on the video.

Orders can be placed on John’s web site, where you can also find his Rhythm Tune Up DVD (guitar and mandolin), and his several Mel Bay books.

Eclectic folk/blues artist David Bromberg is due for a new CD. Though he has released some band projects, a retrospective and some live sets, he has not had a new studio project as a solo artist since 1990.

Appleseed Records has announced that a new Bromberg project is set for a February 2007 release. Entitled Try Me One More Time, it will be a solo project in the truest sense, featuring only David and his guitar. The material will be a mixed bag of roots music styles, including bluegrass, blues, ragtime and folk.

Many followers of acoustic music will recall David from his high profile work as a sideman in the 1970s, touring and recording with artists like Bob Dylan, Tom Paxton, Kris Kristofferson, John Prine and others, and from his popular solo performances at folk festivals all over the world.

Appleseed’s site offers this capsule overview of his life since that time.

After touring and recording extensively throughout the ’70s, a somewhat burned-out Bromberg stepped off the music industry merry-go-round in 1980, moving from San Francisco to Chicago to study violin making. Lured back to his native East Coast two decades later by an invitation to serve as an artist-in-residence in Wilmington, Del., Bromberg has been operating David Bromberg Fine Violins, a retail shop, in recent years and playing an increasing number of concerts, most frequently as a solo performer.

The photo of David above shows him with his signature series Martin guitar, the David Bromberg M-42 model, introduced earlier this year.

Boston-based quartet Crooked Still is heading back to the UK in January 2007. They have four dates in England (1/21-24), followed by an appearance at the Celtic Connections festival in Glasgow on the 25th.

Find info on all their dates on their web site.