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Bach & Friends... That may sound like a name for a Saturday morning cartoon show, but it's actually a newly released DVD that any fan of the music of J.S. Bach, or of fine acoustic string music in general, will surely treasure. We first posted about this film while it was still in production last [...]
Hats off to Steve Martin, who won the Best Bluegrass Album award yesterday (1/31) at the 52nd annual Grammy Awards for The Crow - New Songs For The Five-String Banjo. It was a good day for banjo players overall at the Grammies - at least during the pre-telecast awards ceremony Sunday afternoon in Los Angeles, [...]
Great news for fans of Béla Fleck's Throw Down Your Heart CD, and his brother Sascha Palatino's accompanying film of the same name. Béla has released 14 new tracks that he recorded during his 2005 musical journey of discovery in the west African nations of Mali and The Gambia, and Tanzania and Uganda in east [...]
Banjo bad boy Béla Fleck doing what he does on a medley of Christmas favorites... like no other.
Béla Fleck & The Flecktones will start their Holiday Tour tonight (12/8) in Greenville, SC. They will be performing material from their 2008 Rounder CD, Jingle All The Way, chock full of Christmas music Flecktones style. The band includes Fleck on banjo, Victor Wooten on bass, Jeff Coffin on sax and flute, and Future Man [...]
What happens when a bluegrass banjo player makes a documentary film about a legendary 18th century composer? The result with Michael Lawrence is Bach and Friends, due for DVD release early in 2010. The film looks at the timeless music of Johann Sebastian Bach through the eyes of 21st century musicians in a variety of [...]
Rounder Records has brought back a couple of classic recordings from 1978, capturing a moment when what we might call progressive bluegrass music was still in the process of defining itself. Both albums are brimming with innovative ideas, and should be of interest to all bluegrass fans, perhaps most particularly banjo players. In 2009, Béla [...]
Casey Driessen is not only a fiery fiddler, a fearless improviser and a very talented musician overall. He is also a skilled photographer, with a great eye for a good shot. Casey was tapped to play fiddle on Béla Fleck's Throw Down Your Heart tour earlier this year, along with a number of the African [...]
Monday night fans and musicians filled the Grand Ole Opry house in Nashville to help Rounder Records celebrate forty years in the record business. I really feel like we did help them, because the show was not only a concert, but a television taping. That meant that we had to do a lot of extra [...]
It seems like only yesterday that we celebrated the 60th anniversary of the founding of bluegrass music, marked by the first Grand Ole Opry performance in 1946 by the "Original Blue Grass Band:" Bill Monroe, Lester Flatt, Earl Scruggs, Chubby Wise and Cedric Rainwater (Howard Watts). 60 years seems like both a long time, and [...]
