Carol Beaugard has two interesting guests lined up for this morning’s (3/28) edition of Lonesome Rine RFD on WFDU-FM. Bluegrass Now publisher Wayne Bledsoe and jazz/bluegrass sax man Bill Evans are both scheduled for a visit.

Brance posted last week with the news that Bluegrass Now would cease print publication of the magazine after after the upcoming May issue, and Wayne will talk with Carol about their plans to continue publishing the magazine online. He’ll be on at 11:15 (EDT).

First up at 10:15 will be Bill Evans, whose Soulgrass project has been making waves in both the bluegrass and jazz music worlds. A number of bluegrass and acoustic artists have dabbled with jazzy hybrids, but Evans is the first to seriously combine bluegrass rhythms and instruments with a jazz ensemble. His recordings have featured the work of Bela Fleck, Sam Bush, Stuart Duncan and Jerry Douglas and he currently has banjoist Ryan Cavanaugh in his touring band, which occasionally features Sam Bush as well.

The show is broadcast from 9:00 a.m. to noon on 89.1 FM in the NYC area, and streamed live online at WFDU.fm.

Jazz sax man Bill Evans made waves in 2005 with the release of his Soulgrass project, merging jazz, funk and R&B grooves with bluegrass and traditional string music. It included such acoustic luminaries as Béla Fleck (who also co-produced), Sam Bush, Jerry Douglas and Stuart Duncan along with Evans and fellow jazz giants John Scofield on guitar, among many others.

Soulgrass was nominated for a Grammy in ‘05. Audio samples can be found on the Bill Evans web site.

Evans is hard at work this summer recording a new project, again featuring this jazz/bluegrass jusion approach. Already announced as contributing in the studio are Sam Bush, Béla Fleck and Victor Wooten along with his touring band of Ryan Cavanaugh (banjo), Christian Howes (fiddle) and Joel Rosenblatt (drums).

This new CD, as yet untitled, is expected to be released in Europe in October 2007, and in the US early in 2008.

We posted last month about a week of club dates in New York for Bill Evans’ Soulgrass. This is Bill Evans the jazz sax man who has been recording and performing an interesting jazz/bluegrass fusion, not our friend Bill Evans the bluegrass banjo player and instructor.

The shows will be at the fabled Blue Note starting tonight (1/23-28), and will feature Tony Trischka and Sam Bush along with the other members of Soulgrass.

Craig Havighurst, who blogs at String Theory Media, wrote a piece for today’s Wall Street Journal as a preview for the Evans shows this week. In addition to his overview of the Soulgrass sound, and comments from Evans and Trischka, Craig discusses some of the reasons why bluegrass and jazz aren’t such distant cousins as they may seem at first glance.

In fact, bluegrass and jazz, particularly bebop, are musical contemporaries and cousins—progressive departures from the dominant sounds of their day, forged during World War II. Both drew a line between the traditional and the modern in their respective forms. Even musically there were similarities, beginning with common roots in the blues. Both were inclined toward blazing tempos, rhythmic intricacies and intense, even competitive improvisation, suggesting that these schools, despite coming from cultures as distant and disparate as 1940s New York and 1940s Nashville, might one day meet and mingle to good effect.

The Journal site can not be accessed without a subscription, but the entire piece can be found on Craig’s site.

The legendary New York jazz club, Blue Note, will host six days of jazz/bluegrass fusion next month. Bill Evans’ Soulgrass is booked January 23-28, with Sam Bush on mandolin and Tony Trischka on banjo. They join noted jazz saxophonist Evans with Dave Wecki on drums, Richard Bona on bass and Christian Howes on fiddle.

Evans’ jazz pedigree is pristine, having recorded and performed with Miles Davis in the 1980s. The notion of mixing jazz and bluegrass spun around in his mind for some time, coming to fruition with the 2005 Soulgrass CD, which featured Bela Fleck, Stuart Duncan, Jerry Douglas and Sam Bush along with Evans and such prominent jazzers as John Scofield and Mark Egan.

“I’ve been an Americana fan ever since my Miles days. I liked the sound of mandolin, banjo, dobro and fiddle and I thought that music had a very cool rhythmic approach, even though I never really knew the names of the players or the tunes. I had been listening to some Americana and bluegrass stuff for quite some time. I had some Bill Monroe CDs at home as well as recordings by Bruce Hornsby, the Flecktones, Sam Bush, Mark O’Conner. Music of that genre was very inspiring to me. Bluegrass and jazz are very similar in so many ways. As a jazz musician, it’s all just a different way to improvise and express yourself. I find it very exciting to combine both kinds of music. It is a dream of mine to play on stage at the Blue Note with all these great musicians and create some totally new music!”

Samples of Soulgrass can be heard on the Bill Evans site. Full details on the show can be found on the Blue Note web site.