The appearance by Larry Keel & Natural Bridge on WoodSongs Old Time Radio Hour from this past Monday - which Brance had mentioned earlier - can now be viewed as an online video.
They perform several songs - including some new ones not yet released on CD - and chat briefly with Woodsongs host Michael Jonathan.
Folk duo Blue House also perform on this show.
Watch the full program on the Woodsongs web site.
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Larry Keel & Natural Bridge have announced a number of shows in early December featuring very special guest Tony Rice.
Larry and Tony have performed together many times, and you can be sure that there will be some fiery flatpicking at each of these concerts.
More show details can be found on the Larry Keel web site.
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Acoustic guitar Maharishi Larry Keel, along with his band Natural Bridge, will be making an appearance on WoodSongs Old Time Radio Hour on Monday, November 12, 2007.
If you’ve ever seen Keel and band in concert you know what kind of energy you’re in store for. If you haven’t seem them live, you should make a point of catching this show. It’s coming to a radio and computer near you.
The show is broadcast from The Kentucky Theatre in Lexington, KY. The show starts at 6:45 PM EST, and is broadcast to 900,000 listeners on over 400 radio stations, including a number of international stations, and now XM Radio Channel 15.
In addition to the radio broadcast, the show can also be heard, and seen, online. The WoodSongs Webcast is a multi-camera weekly broadcast made available online as a streaming cybercast, and also as a downloadable podcast. Join the fun at 7 PM to watch the 60 minute show live as it happens, then stay tuned at 8:05 PM for the encore performance. The encore is not broadcast on radio due to time restraints.
The webcast happens live and the show is made available as a podcast soon after the show date. Visit this page for more information about the WoodSongs Podcast.
If you’d like to be part of the studio audience, the ticket cost is $10. More information is available here.
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Earlier this week we told you about the fundraising auction being held by WDVX Knoxville, and of the autographed Martin DXM guitar being auctioned. That auction ends tomorrow, Sunday February 11th, but this evening sees the beginning of the auction for the second instrument.
This time around it’s a Tony Rice model Santa Cruz guitar signed by Tony Rice himself. This guitar is built to Tony’s personal specifications with Adirondack spruce and Indian rosewood. It features a shorter scale at 25.25″ which provides for a fast and supple action. It also has the signature 4 9/16″ soundhole and a hand-tuned top.
Tony says this is:
a guitar you can go to war with
In addition to Tony’s signature, the instrument also boasts the autographs of Del McCoury and Larry Keel. Once again this instrument does come with its own hard shell case. Both the guitar and case were graciously provided by Smoky Mountain Guitars in Pigeon Forge.
The bidding began yesterday evening, Friday February 9th, and will continue through the auction’s closing date of Sunday February 18th, at 6PM EST. More photos of the instrument are available on the ebay auction page.
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UPDATED 4:15 p.m. and re-written for bonehead error - see bottom of post.
The February 2007 issue of Guitar Player Magazine includes a feature on flatpicker Larry Keel. This is the current issue, now available in stores.
Larry has skirted the line between modern bluegrass and the jamgrass scene for years, consistently confounding those who seek to place him in one camp or the other.
Guitar Player is geared towards musicians, and this feature is likely to focus on Larry’s contributions as a professional guitarist.
Editor’s note: We had erroneously posted this morning that the feature on Larry was in Acoustic Guitar magazine. Oops…
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We just received word of this special holiday concert tour. The tour will consist of a set of music performed by Larry Keel & Natural Bridge and a set by Peter Rowan. There will also be extensive collaboration between the artists. Keel calls his music New Mountain Music, and Peter Rowan 
combines bluegrass, blues, and reggae into a sound all his own. The holidays are all about congregation and celebration and these two pickers are doing just that.
Only five stops are planned on this tour so if you’re interested you’ll need to act now. Here are the tour dates.
Here’s a press release with some great background info about both Keel and Rowan. (more…)
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The Colorado Playboys are planning a December tour in, of all places, Colorado! And just who are the Colorado Playboys?
The band is comprised of pickers who have or do play in other bands, and have gotten together just for this tour during the holiday season. Andy Thorn, formerly with Larry Keel & Natural Bridge, will be playing banjo. Travis Book of the Infamous Stringdusters will be holding down the low end on bass. John Frazier of Hit and Run Bluegrass will be playing mandolin. And Jon Stickley of The Biscuit Burners will be playing guitar.
Thorn, Book and Stickley have played together previously in the Rockygrass winning band Broke Mountain (has nothing to do with any movie) so they have quite a bit of experience playing together and this will kind of be a reunion for them in a sense.
A number of dates have already been booked and can be viewed at either Andy Thorn’s Myspace or Travis Book’s Myspace pages.
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Our sources tell us that Larry Keel is in the studio this week with his band Natural Bridge, working on a new bluegrass CD. The CD is a mixture of familiar bluegrass numbers, like Groundspeed, and original compositions by various band members. The CD is being cut live in the studio with as little overdubbing as possible.
A title has not yet been announced but Larry says an early spring release is planned.
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I should clear the air up front and tell you that this disc was recorded, mixed, and mastered by me at my studio.
Keel Brothers Volume 2 is the second duet recording flatpicking guitar master Larry Keel has made his brother Gary. This is a brother duet album that at times just features the two brothers and their guitars. They are joined on this disc by their wives, who both play bass on various tracks. Larry’s wife, Jenny, also contributes harmony vocals on several songs. The CD is comprised largely of traditional fiddle tunes as well as old folk and bluegrass songs. Possibly my favorite track on the disc is the cover of Gordon Lightfoot’s ballad Don Quixote.
Audio samples in the Real Player format are available here.
I can also tell you that we have the majority of the tracks cut for an upcoming band CD from Larry and his bluegrass band, Natural Bridge. This will be the sophmore release from this band and should be out in the spring of 2007.
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Charles Humphrey III, bass player with the Steep Canyon Rangers, has a new solo project, entirely made up of songs of his own composition. Entitled Songs From The Road, it is a self produced project which features his Rangers band mates, The Biscuit Burners and Larry Keel and Natural Bridge.
Audio samples can be found on Charles’ CDBaby page, which also includes a prominent endorsement from Tim O’Brien.
“Charles Humphrey showcases some fine new bluegrass songs on his new CD ‘Song From The Road.’ ‘Take My Cup And Fill It Up’ is a catchy drinkin’ song, while ‘Roll’n On’ could have been a hit for Jimmy Martin. You can almost hear hearts breaking in the duet, ‘I Can’t Remember When I Stopped Loving You.’ Sing these songs yourself, or go hear them…”
Charles has posted some photos from the CD release party on his site.
The CD can be ordered from Charles’ official web site, from CDBaby, and surely at any of the Steep Canyon Rangers’ live shows.
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Larry Keel has been a prominent fixture both in, and on the fringes of the bluegrass mainstream this past few years, but his place on the spectrum has been hard to pin down. Here he’s doing jamgrass shows, performing the sort of extended format piece that is a highlight of the style, and there he forms a bluegrass band, Natural Bridge, and has one of his songs cut by The Del McCoury Band. He has further clouded any attempts at pigeonholing his music by a set of brother duets and flatpick standards with his older sibling, Gary, entitled The Keel Brothers, Vol 1.
With Natural Bridge, Larry incorporated his unique, growly vocal delivery with his equally distinctive guitar style, inside the standard bluegrass ensemble. Their material has been a mix of traditional music with his own compositions, and their tour stops tend to be centered around venues and festivals that support more progressive acoustic music. Folks here in southwestern VA, though, recall Larry as a long-time Galax veteran, who learned and refined his craft in the same muddy fields as have many of the leading lights in mainstream bluegrass music today.
When we learned that original Natural Bridge banjo picker Andy Thorn would be leaving the group this summer, we wondered whether Larry would continue touring with a bluegrass group, or perhaps take his music in a new direction. The answer arrived this past week, when it was announced that Jason Flournoy, late of the popular jamgrass band Shanti Groove, will start up with Natural Bridge the second weekend in September when they play The Pour House in Charleston, SC.
Alt-acoustic and jamgrass fans may associate Jason with CO, since that was Shanti Groove’s home base, but he is a native of the southeastern US, learning to play banjo in western NC. It was here that he first met current Natural Bridge mandolinist Mark Schimick, with whom he shared the stage in a band known as Sassagrass before spending time with the Dixie Slam Mob prior to joining up with the Shantis.
In addition to Larry on guitar, Jason on banjo and Mark on mandolin, Natural Bridge includes Jenny Keel on bass.
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As Apple’s iTunes Music Store has grabbed up a larger segment of the worldwide music purchasing pie, many smaller independent labels and artists have been concerned that their releases would be lost amidst the slick promotion for mainstream pop projects on iTunes. Legal music download sales tripled in 2005 to just over one billion dollars (US), with digital downloads accounting for approximately 6% of all music sales. Online distributors’ catalogs were said to contain more than 2 million tracks at the end of last year, with iTunes commanding a majority of download sales in many markets.
From its inception, Apple has insisted that it wanted to broaden rather than restrict iTunes’ offerings, and initially reached out to smaller labels. Contrary to what many believe, however, Apple does not host the audio files themselves, and smaller labels often were unprepared for the technical aspects of converting files for digital distribution and making them available for iTunes on an appropriate server for download. The larger bluegrass labels (like Rounder, Sugar Hill and Rebel) now have much of their catalog on iTunes, with new projects generally released simultaneously on audio CD and iTunes. Rebel has even begun to make out-of-print titles available for iTunes-only release, a trend we hope will become more widespread.
A number of companies have arisen to assist small labels (and artists) get their music into the digital distribution realm, and iTunes is seeing more and more projects that are independently produced show up in their catalog. CD Baby has been very effective in getting independent projects into iTunes, and a number of wholesale distributors are also getting into this business. Copper Creek Records has indicated that their catalog will soon be available for digital download, and are being assisted in this effort by their primary distributor, Select-O-Hits.
Two artists we found recently on iTunes are friends of The Bluegrass Blog whose music should appeal to our readers.
Larry Keel has been a prominent fixture on the alternative acoustic scene for some time, though his more recent efforts have been a bit more mainstream bluegrass. His current band, Natural Bridge, has a grassy edge, and one of Larry’s Tunes, Mountain Song, was featured on the previous release from The Del McCoury Band. He now has three projects available to sample or purchase for download from iTunes.
If you have iTunes installed, you can find his solo project, Journey, the debut CD with his new band, Larry Keel & Natural Bridge, and a duet project with his brother Gary, The Keel Brothers Vol. 1.
Also up on iTunes are two CDs from Acoustic Endeavors, both their debut release, Coming Of Age… again, and the current On A Farm. Both CDs are made up of all-original material, and feature one of this blog’s authors on banjo.
These are projects that were wholly artist-produced, or by artist-owned independent labels, showing that this sort of release can make its way into such a dominant venue if the artists are diligent and persistent.
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The recent passing of fiddling legend Vassar Clements has left us all a little blue. I was in the studio working with Larry Keel and his brother Gary when Vassar left us. I got Larry to tell a story about the first time he played with Vassar and then he and Gary recorded a short two guitar version of San Antonio Rose in honor of Vassar. We offer the story and the song here as a podcast tribute to Vassar.
Vassar Clements tribute podcast
Our podcast feed is available here.
We recommend the use of ipodder for subscribing to the podcast.
If you use Apple Computer’s iTunes application, you can subscribe to our podcast here.
Both are crossplatform and support automated downloads.
If you are new to podcasting please read:
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