Not a lot of bluegrass content here, but if you are a fan of the Alison Krauss/Robert Plant combo and would like to see them live, here’s your chance.

The Austin City Limits Music Festival is taking place September 26-28. The only bluegrass related acts I saw on the bill where the Krauss-Plant show and The Sparrow Quartet with Abigail Washburn and Bela Fleck.

If you’d like to go, you could attend in style. YallWire.com, and it’s network affiliates, is giving away two VIP tickets to the festival. VIP treatment includes access to the VIP lounge with air-conditioned bathrooms, free lunch and dinner buffets, free drinks (water, beer, wine), and more.

To enter the contest you have to register with blastro.com (YallWire’s parent company), and leave a comment telling them why you should be the lucky winner. There are currently less than 250 entries, so the odds are pretty good. The winner will be chosen by the end of this week though, so hurry.

YallWire.com features free music videos from bluegrass, country, and Christian artists.

The Sparrow Quartet will be kicking off this year’s Woodstock Film Festival with a concert. The concert will take place at the Bearsville Theater west of downtown Woodstock, on October 1, 2008.

The Sparrow Quartet is lead by Abigail Washburn and features banjo master Bela Fleck, along with Casey Driessen and Ben Sollee.

In addition to the concert, Bela’s documentary, Throw Down Your Heart, will also be featured with a special screening during the film festival.

Throw Down Your Heart won the Fan’s Choice Award at the South by Southwest film festival in Austin, TX earlier this year.

The July 21, 2008 issue of Newsweek magazine included a feature on banjo player, vocalist and songwriter Abigail Washburn and her current touring and recording venue, Sparrow Quartet.

The magazine’s Brian Braiker caught up with Abby and fellow quartet members Béla Fleck, Casey Driessen and Ben Sollee at a live performance in New York’s Battery Park, where she shared how she came to a career in music after studying Chinese in college.

But somewhere along the way, Washburn, who also sang in college, picked up a banjo for largely the same reason she decided to learn Chinese—it was hard. She mastered the old-timey clawhammer style well enough that, by the time she was considering a career in international law, a trip to Nashville turned into a much longer stay. There she cut a demo consisting of the first two songs she’d written, one in English, the other—because, hell, why not?—in Mandarin. Eventually, the allure of woodshedding in Tennessee trumped the corporate path waiting abroad. “Am I going to use my skills to represent Anheuser-Busch and Payless Shoes?” companies she had consulted for, “or am I going to have something to say?” she asks. She handed her demo to banjo virtuoso Béla Fleck at a party, who listened on the drive home. He says he became so absorbed that he got pulled over for speeding. “She wasn’t doing anything fancy,” he tells NEWSWEEK. “There was just something pure and beautiful about what she did.”

You can read the full piece at Newsweek.com, where they also have an exclusive video of the Quartet performing Captain, a piece from their current CD, Abigail Washburn & The Sparrow Quartet (audio samples on iTunes).

HT: Katy Daley at WAMU’s Bluegrass Country

Video of a recent performance by Abigail Washburn & The Sparrow Quartet on the Woodsongs Old Time Radio Hour can now be viewed online.

The group is composed of Abby on clawhammer banjo and vocals, Bela Fleck on 3 finger banjo, Casey Driessen on fiddle and Ben Sollee on cello.

They are the sole guests on this program, and perform for the full hour amidst discussions with host Michael Johnathon about their new self-titled CD, from which they draw selections for the show.

See the full show online at the Woodsongs site.

Folk musician Abigail Washburn has certainly raised awareness of the banjo around the world in recent years. She has collaborated with banjo great Bela Fleck, along with cellist Ben Sollee and fiddler Casey Driessen, to bring American banjo music to China. The band, known as The Sparrow Quartet, became the first US band to officially tour Tibet in the fall of 2007, at the behest of the Chinese government.

Three years after the release of her debut album, Song of the Traveling Daughter, this new self titled (after the band) sophomore recording hits the streets on May 20, 2008. The entire band, including Fleck, had a hand in the composition and arrangement of the record. Fleck produced the recording for Nettwerk Records. Washburn comments that this record was an effort to

…intentionally create art that is more than what I ever thought I was capable of. These musicians allowed me to dream big, and they had the chops to execute it all, and then some.

Featuring 13 songs, the CD stylistically spans the bridge between traditional American folk/bluegrass tunes such as Banjo Pickin’ Girl, to traditional Chinese folk songs such as Taiyang chulai (We’re Happy Under the Sun), to a number of originals written by the band for this project. The arrangements bear the marks of both American and Chinese tradition with a certain cinematic quality and even some classical sounding moments. Part of the uniqueness of the sound comes from the composition of the band itself. The quartet features two banjos, a cello and a fiddle. That combination of instrumentation, along with the diversity of musical backgrounds the four players bring to the table results in a sound that is all their own. And the results speak for themselves.

The foursome begins a North American tour Friday night with a show in Boulder, CO. This is the first of over 100 performances planned in support of the new CD. The tour includes some high-profile performances at Bonnaroo, Merlefest, New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, and the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing.

For a complete listing of tour dates, be sure to visit them online at AbigailWashburn.com.

Audio tracks and tours dates are available on Abigail’s MySpace page as well.

On today’s (4/3) edition of Blue Plate Special on WDVX, Abigail Washburn & Sparrow Quartet featuring Béla Fleck will perform. The show airs at noon (EDT) from the Knoxville, TN studios of WDVX before a live audience, ahead of their show tonight at The Down Home in Johnson City.

The Quartet includes Washburn and Fleck on banjos along with Casey Driessen on fiddle and Ben Sollee on cello. They have a CD released in 2006 on Nettwerk and they toured extensively in Asia in support. Abby speaks Chinese fluently, and worked as a translator for many years.

WDVX  is broadcast in the Knoxville market at 102.9 FM - and via live streaming online.

We got a note recently from progressive banjoist Jake Schepps, letting us know that he and his Expedition Quartet are heading from Boulder, CO to New York City for this week’s Arts Presenters Conference. The annual conference brings together performing artists and buyers in the worlds of music, dance, theater, family programming and comedy.

Jake tells us that a number of acoustic string acts will be showcasing as well this year, including Abigail Washburn’s Sparrow Quartet, Laurie Lewis and the RIght Hands, Bill Evan’s Soul Grass with Sam Bush, Bearfoot, and more.

A full conference schedule can be found online.

CBS recently ran a short piece on Abigail Washburn and her banjo. What makes Abigail newsworthy is the fact that she’s playing, and singing, American music in China.

The video shows footage of her performing at the Beijing Jazz Festival, and in the studio. There is even a short segment of her singing the bluegrass tune “Winter’s Come And Gone” in Chinese.

During the course of the interview segments, Washburn explains how she became interested in the banjo.

It was actually spending all this time living in China and feeling awkward in a different country that led me to look back to my own roots and discover what it was about my country that made me feel like I belonged. And that’s when I found the banjo.

I feel like the attraction for me is that it really leads me back home… And it makes home clearly greater than anything one could possibly put into words.

Washburn plays old-time style clawhammer banjo, not Scruggs style three-finger banjo. She performs with the all girl, old-time band, Uncle Earl, as well as engagements as a solo artist.

The clip is only two and half minutes long, though you will have to sit through an advertisement before getting to the content.

We found a number of feature pieces on bluegrass/acoustic artists in various print publications this past few days.

Friday’s Knoxville News Sentinel ran an interview with Abby Washburn of Uncle Earl. She talked about their upcoming CD, Waterloo, Tennessee, and having it produced by John Paul Jones, former bass player with Led Zeppelin. The discussion also turned to the notion of performing with an all-female string band.

“Everybody has a different perception of what it means to be an all-female band,” says Washburn. “Sometimes it works in our favor. And sometimes bluegrass festivals will hire us, it seems like, as a way to fill a quota.”

However, Washburn says that women, especially, seem to appreciate the group.

“I think we make it more accessible to them — especially since we haven’t all been playing this music since we were 4 years old,” she says.

Read the whole piece on the News Sentinel site.

Sunday’s edition of The Tennessean, Nashville’s hometown paper, had a piece on The Grascals’ recent appearance with Dierks Bentley on The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson. Staff writer Peter Cooper accompanied the band to Los Angeles for the show, and recounts their day at the CBS studio. He also spoke with Ferguson about his appreciation for American country music, and his desire to include it in The Late Late Show programming.

“I got here at this show two years ago and said, ‘We need to send a message to the country community that this is a country-friendly show,’” he said. “When I was a kid in Scotland, we heard a lot of country music. It was Johnny Cash — forever — and then there was Hank Williams. The first Hank Williams. Country music is popular in Glasgow, Scotland. These are working-class, drinking people.”

You can read the lengthy piece online at The Tennessean site.

This morning’s edition of the Fredericksburg, VA Free Lance-Star has a feature on tomorrow’s release of Slidin’ Home by John Starling & Carolina Star. Since Fredericksburg can lay claim to Starling as a former resident, the article focuses on the fact that Starling left bluegrass to dedicate himself to medical practice, but is now back after his retirement.

Thirty years ago, the Seldom Scene bluegrass band founding member quit the cult-favorite-group-to-be to focus on ears, noses and throats in a Fredericksburg medical practice.

Now he’s retired from medicine–concentrating exclusively on ears.

Read this one online as well.

When we posted last week that audio samples from the upcoming Uncle Earl CD, Waterloo, Tennessee, were up on the Rounder site, we also mentioned that the new project had been produced by John Paul Jones, former bass player and keyboard man with ’70s mega-group Led Zeppelin.

Rounder has posted an interview with Jones on their site, where he talks about his own discovery of American bluegrass, how he first met Uncle Earl at Merlefest, and how he approached the production for the new CD.

“I met some friends in New York who gave me a Dillards album Backporch Bluegrass and was much taken by the energy and drive of the music. The harmonies, too, reminded me of all the Everly Brothers records I used to sing along to in my teenage years. Latterly I came across Alison Krauss and Union Station on British radio, which re-awakened my interest. I then caught concerts by Del McCoury, Nickel Creek, Tim O’Brien, and Gillian Welch and gradually sought out more and more traditional music. I have now just started on old-time fiddle!”

For some reason, Rounder has broken the brief interview into two parts, and you need to visit both here and here to read the entire thing.

Pre-orders for Waterloo, Tennessee are now available from the band, with shipping upon release on March 13, 2007.

Rounder Records has just posted audio samples from the upcoming release from Uncle Earl, Waterloo, Tennessee, their second for Rounder. It was produced by John Paul Jones (of Led Zeppelin fame) and features the same brand of raucous old time and folk music as their debut project, She Waits for Night.

The new CD is set for release on March 13, and pre-orders are being accepted on the Rounder site.

The band consists of Abigail Washburn (banjo), KC Groves (mandolin, bass and guitar), Rayna Gellert (fiddle), and Kristin Andreassen (fiddle and guitar). All four ladies contribute to the group’s vocals.

You can find the g’Earls’ (as they put it) tour schedule on the band’s web site, along with a number of live performances on video.

We posted last week about some of the press coverage from China of the current Sparrow Quartet tour. The band features Bela Fleck and Abigail Washburn on picked and non-picked banjo respectively, with Casey Driessen on fiddle and Ben Sollee on cello.

There is a fascinating video up on YouTube that shows the Sparrow Quartet jamming with members of Hanggai, a Mongolian folk band, on the roof of a building in Beijing. The clip opens with the assembled musicians playing what I presume is a traditional Chinese melody, and progresses to Bela showing them the traditional fiddle tune, Sourwood Mountain.

Interviews with the musicians are conducted in their native languages, with English subtitles provided on the YouTube video, and Chinese subtitles on this version of the video on tudou.com.

The part that I found fascinating is the common musical ground the musicians found despite the cultural gulf between their backgrounds. Washburn, who has studied in China and speaks the language well, is essential to making this musical bridge work. Both she and Bela discuss the reactions to their music in China in the course of this clip.

The video is also available on the Danwei.TV site, which has some additional links about this tour, which now seems to be concluded.

I found an interesting piece on Xinhua online, an English language version of ChinaView.cn about a set of performances this weekend by Sparrow Quartet in Bejing. The group includes Bela Fleck and Abigail Washburn on banjos, with Casey Driessen on fiddle and Ben Sollee on cello.

Washburn, who plays banjo with Uncle Earl and studied in China, has been active for several years in musical collaborations with a Sino-American synthesis. She has been touring in Asia with Sparrow Quartet off and on since late October, a tour that runs another month.

It’s worth a visit to the site to check out the show poster, with it’s 1940s vintage show poster vibe, in a mix of Chinese and English.

I just got a note from Donald Nitchie about the next issue of Banjo Newsletter.

In the November issue of the Banjo Newsletter we feature the new Smithsonian/Folkways release In Sacred Trust: The 1963 Fleming Brown Tapes by Hobart Smith, with an introduction by Dick Spottswood, and an interview with producer Stephen Wade. We also profile clawhammer player Abigail Washburn, and English 3-finger picker Leon Hunt. Reviews this month include the reissue of Earl Scruggs and the 5-String Banjo and Banjo.com’s instructional video Pickin’ 101. The issue also includes columns by Tony Trischka, Tom Adams, Ken Perlman, Casey Henry and Eddie Collins.

For every issue of Banjo Newsletter, Donald posts mp3 audio files online for the majority of the tabs found in each issue.