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 B?©la 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‚Äîit 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‚Äîbecause, hell, why not?‚Äîin 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 B?©la 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.