Michael Cleveland & Flamekeeper featuring Audie Blaylock have a 10 day Canadian tour in the works for next month. Their first show is on April 20 in Ontario, where they will spend the largest part of their time in Canada.

All the Canadian dates are listed on the band’s tour schedule page online.

On another Michael Cleveland note: The April issue of Strings Magazine has a brief feature on Michael. It is the back page Encore column by Robert L. Doerschuk.

The April issue will be on newsstands soon, and the Strings web site will update when the cover date arrives. Many articles from each issue are posted online. The piece they did on Jason Carter in the March issue can now be read online.

Knoxville, TN radio station WDVX plays a blend of music styles that cover the gamut of acoustic styles including bluegrass, gospel, and americana. The station provides an online media player as well as support for Windows Media 96K, and a 128K iTunes feed.

Supported entirely by listener donations, benefit concerts, and local business underwriting, the station is not affiliated with any college, university, religious or political organization. In a new effort at fundraising, the station is auctioning off three great instruments that have been autographed by a number of prominent artists.

The instruments are being auctioned on ebay through the Giving Works program designed for non-profits. All proceeds from the auctions go directly to support the station and it’s programing.

The first instrument on the auction block is an autographed Martin DXM Dreadnought guitar. The instrument has been autographed by Robert Earl Keen, Tim O’Brien, Del McCoury, John Hiatt, Alison Krauss, Dan Tyminski, Jerry Douglas, Jason Carter, Ron Block, Mike Bub and more.

The bidding began this past Friday, February 2nd, and will continue through the auction’s closing date of Sunday February 11th, at 6PM EST.

The instrument comes complete with a hard shell case. The Martin DXM is a mahogany guitar with a modified low oval neck profile, 1 11/16″ nut, 25.4″ scale length, 2 1/8″ bridge string spacing, and Martin’s pattern HPL textured finish.

More photos of the instrument are available on the ebay auction page.

Jason Carter, the hot shot fiddler in The Del McCoury Band, is profiled in the March 2007 issue of Strings Magazine. This issue has a photo of Scottish violinist Nicola Benedetti on the cover, and should be on newstands soon.

The piece on Jason (by Robert L. Doerschuk, a Nashville writer and musician) won’t shed much new light for bluegrass fans who have followed his career, but it is nice to see him featured in such a high profile publication, which is more generally oriented towards classical violin.

The article does talk a bit about his influences, and how he learned to play.

Aside from practicing some hoedown rhythm patterns he’d heard from Paul Warren and other early bluegrass fiddlers, Carter based his education almost entirely on copying how fiddlers played behind singers. “I never even learned many fiddle tunes,” he says. “I remember learning ‘Katy Hill’ from a recording by Georgia Slim [aka Robert Rutland], who was a great player. But I mostly listened to how the fiddle player backed up the singer.”

Strings will generally make a few articles in each issue available online, so check back there from time to time to see if Jason’s is posted.

UPDATE 3/4/07: The Jason Carter article is available now on the Strings site.

Last January, both Brance and I had the chance to attend the Pickin’ at the Paramount all star concert in Bristol, TN. The show was an offshoot of one that I helped organize in 2000 (reprised in 2001) to celebrate the release of Knee Deep In Bluegrass - The AcuTab Sessions. You can read my report on last year’s show here.

The show has been scheduled again this year, and will be held next weekend (1/20/07) at The Paramount Center on historic State Street in Bristol.

The format of the current show is similar to the one we started in 2000, and reminiscent of the old “package tour” shows popular in the 1950s and 60s. An all star cast of prominent bluegrass pickers and singers will rotate on and off the stage in a variety of configurations, generally performing material outside of what you might normally hear them doing.

This year’s lineup includes Bobby Hicks, Ronnie Bowman, Mike Bub, David Talbot, Larry Cordle, Rob McCoury, Don Rigsby, Kim Fox, Darrell Webb, Steve Gulley, Jason Carter, Barry Bales, Paul Williams, Kenny & Amanda Smith and David Grier.

There will be two shows on January 20, at 3:00 and 7:30 p.m. Tickets and show details can be found at the Pickin’ at the Paramount site, or the Paramount Center site.