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.

After teaching at Sore Fingers Week in England earlier this month, Rob Ickes, Noam Pikelny and Casey Driessen did some touring in the UK as The Nashville Acoustic All Stars.

The folks at ukbluegrass.com posted yesterday with links to three video clips on YouTube from a performance of theirs in Scotland. They were shot with two cameras, and offer a nice look at these fine musicians up close in a loose, jam-like setting.

The songs from this show (at the Polish Club, Kirkcaldy, Fife) are Sally In The Garden, Aint’ Gonna Work Tomorrow and Foggy Mountain Rock.

There is one other clip from this tour on YouTube, shot at the Ex-Servicemans Club, Helsby in England. This one has the boys playing a rip-roarin’ version of Groundspeed - which also includes a couple of choice quips from the guys at the start.

Our friends at UKBluegrass.com just let us know that they have posted to their blog an interview with John and Moira Wirtz who organize Europe’s largest bluegrass/old time music camp, Sore Fingers. The camp has been running each year since 1996 and is scheduled for April 9-14, 2007 this year.

The interview is quite readable and contains a lot of background historical information about the camp. They also talk about the goals they have for the camp this year and in the future. And in describing the camp’s atmosphere, they bring up one of my favorite things about this music, the accessibility of the players.

The instructors for this year’s camp are some of the best players bluegrass music has to offer including, Janet Beazley, Noam Pikelny, Casey Driessen, Rob Ickes, John Lowell, Chris Stuart, and others.

“The event is up there with any other camp,” says John, “but it’s uniquely British in the social aspect and the humour.” Most of the tutors get stuck in to the socialising without difficulty, mingling in the bar and taking part in the sessions. “I love seeing the kids jamming with the tutors,” says John.

What a great opportunity for these youngsters.

If you missed the last interview UKBluegrass.com posted you might want to check it out as well. It’s a good interview with current IBMA Board Chairman, Greg Cahill. You’ll find that interview here.

Last month, we passed along some information about The Sparrow Quartet’s lengthy tour of China. The quartet includes Abigail Washburn and Bela Fleck on banjo, Casey Driessen on fiddle, and Ben Sollee on cello.

Casey created a slide show of photos he took while in China, and it can be viewed on the Sugar Hill Records web site. The photos are not so much of the musicians, but more in the travelogue vein.

There is a video from the tour available as well on YouTube.

We posted earlier this week that Mountain Heart fiddler Jim VanCleve had recently celebrated the birth of his first child, Ryaan. When the nominations were announced yesterday morning for the 49th Grammy Awards, it turned out that Jim has something else to crow about.

The song, Nature Of The Beast from his debut CD release, No Apologies, received a nomination in the Best Country Instrumental Performance category.

“I can’t really even put into words what an extreme honor it is to be recognized with a Grammy Nomination!! It’s incredible! To be nominated right alongside some of my musical heroes in the Instrumental Performance of the Year category, is the most flattering honor I could ever imagine! I thought that “Nature of the Beast’ definitely had a certain mood that really hit home with me, but I certainly wasn’t ready for this!! Thanks to everyone who has supported me and my efforts on ‘No Apologies’ in the past year!!”

The other nominees in this category include Casy Driessen (Jerusalem Ridge from 3D), Tommy Emmanuel (Gameshow Rag/Cannonball Rag from The Mystery), Bryan Sutton & Doc Watson (Whiskey Before Breakfast from Not Too Far From The Tree) and Chris Thile (The Eleventh Reel from How To Grow A Woman From The Ground).

Congratulations and best of luck to all the nominees for Best Country Instrumental Performance. The Awards will be announced in Los Angeles, CA on February 11, 2007.

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.

If you attend many bluegrass or acoustic music shows, you’ve surely encountered young fiddle phenom, Casey Driessen. Just 27 years old, he’s toured with Chris Jones, Tim O’Brien, B???la Fleck and folk/country rebel, Steve Earle since graduating from Berklee College of Music. Casey’s fiddle was also heard on the soundtrack of the smash hit Johnny Cash bio-pic, Walk The Line.

On May 9, Casey’s first solo project, 3D, is set to be released on Sugar Hill. Not much news on either Casey’s or Sugar Hill’s site, but the material seems to include some original compositions as well as tunes that especially appeal to Driessen. Guest artists include Viktor Krauss, Jerry Douglas, Tim O”Brien, Béla Fleck, Darrell Scott and Jamey Haddad.