The festival features Jesse Brock, Claudine Langille, Skip Gorman, and David Surette, with special guests Susie Burke and Baron Collins-Hill. This two-day event offers group lessons, workshops on a variety of topics, jam sessions, and an evening concert. Additionally, the festival will present a March 2, Friday night concert featuring the same performers at The Elysium Arts Folk Club, Rollinsford, NH (this is a separate ticket from the Concord events).

To register for the festival, send a check for $110 made out to:

Concord Community Music School
23 Wall St.
Concord, NH 03301

Lodging is available at the Courtyard Marriott Hotel and Conference Center in Concord, New Hampshire, with a special festival rate. A limited number of rooms have been set aside, so if you are interested, please contact the hotel directly at (603) 225-0303.

Festival sponsors include Sanborn, Head and Associates, the NH State Council on the Arts Traditional Arts program, and the Concord Courtyard by Marriott, where festival accommodations are available at a special rate. Support is also provided by mandolincafe.com.

Jamie Dailey

National Heritage Museum
Lexington, MA
7:30pm (doors open at 6:30pm)
$27 ($24 for BBU Members)

Tickets can be purchased through the BBU Web site or by mailing a check (payable to the BBU) and self-addressed stamped envelope to Boston Bluegrass Union, PO Box 650061, West Newton, MA 02465.

The National Heritage Museum is located at 33 Marrett Rd. (Route 2A), Lexington, MA 02421.

Note: Goodtime mandolin player Andy Sicard studied with Skip through a year-long Arts Apprenticeship Grant awarded by the NH State Council of the Arts in 2007.

Here is an excerpt from the Boston Bluegrass Union Web site about the class:

Mandolin Master Class with Skip Gorman

This intermediate/advanced class will work on both oldtimey and bluegrass styles of playing with a focus on fiddle tunes (hoedowns and waltzes) along with some practice in accompaniment and singing.   Simple chording, fingering and the importance of right hand technique will be stressed.  Tunes will be chosen by class consensus and will be learned by ear by breaking them into sections and playing them over and over again slowly until they become part of us and we lovingly become part of them. Please feel free to email with any questions or to register.

Skip Gorman has has been playing the old time bluegrass and old timey styles of mandolin for 50 years. During this time he has worked to capture the essence of the older roots sounds of American rural folk music.  His accomplishments as a fiddle player and singer of southern ballads and ballads of the early American West have helped guide his mandolin interpretations.    For several years Skip has been an instructor at the International Bluegrass Museum’s “Bill Monroe Mandolin Camp” with Roland White, Mike Compton and Frank Wakefield . He has also taught mandolin and fiddle at Augusta Heritage, Swanannoa and Old Time Music Camp North with Mike Seeger and Sam Bush;  and has appeared on workshops with Ronnnie McCoury, Chris Thiele, Butch Baldesari, Norman Blake and Rhonda Vincent.  As a teenager, Skip was fortunate enough to have played on several occasions with Bill Monroe.  An early member of Utah’s Dsert String Band, Skip continues to perform old time bluegrass with Richard Starkey as part of the duo “Rabbit In A Log.”  He has several award-winning recordings on the Old West,  Rounder, Folk Legacy, No Part A Nothin’, and Columbia Legacy labels.  Skip has appeared on Garrison Keillor’s “A Prairie Home Companion” and Ken Burns has used Skip’s music in two of his documentary films.

Email: skip@skipgorman.com
Website: http://www.skipgorman.com
Old West Recordings 603 523-7661

Harvard University (Cambridge, MA)  has scheduled an academic event on February 6 focused on bluegrass music. The one day seminar is entitled, Fire On The Mountain – A Bluegrass Symposium, and will feature a keynote address and panel discussions including a number of prominent bluegrass musicians and educators. Things kick off at 10:30 a.m. with an opening keynote from Berklee’s Matt Glaser, and will run throughout the day, capped by an early evening concert.

Presenters and panelists include legendary musicians Sam Bush and Bobby Hicks, noted banjoist, producer and record company exec Alison Brown (a 1984 Harvard grad), luthier Lynn Dudenbostel, historian Neil Rosenberg, and Jack Tottle, founding director of the bluegrass program at ETSU. Topics for the panels include a look at the history and traditions of bluegrass, the craftsmen and the instruments who make the music, and where the genre is moving in contemporary music.

A pair of current Harvard students will also be featured. Forrest O’Connor, a senior music major who is doing his undergraduate thesis on luthiery, proposed this topic to the administration, and has been involved at every level of planning and implementation. He is the son of fiddle/violin master Mark O’Connor, and founder of the Harvard College American Music Association. Clint Miller is set to graduate in 2011 with a Philosophy degree, and is a blues and bluegrass guitarist. Both will perform in the evening concert.

The Symposium will be hosted by the Harvard Committee on Degrees in Folklore & Mythology, along with the Office for the Arts (OFA), the Office of the Provost, the Undergraduate Council, and the Harvard College American Music Association (HCAMA) There is no charge to attend, nor reservation required. Full details can be found online here.

1. Master Classes at Joe Val! Boston Bluegrass Union has announced that once again, master classes will be offered the day that the festival begins, Friday, Feb. 12th.

They have Jimmy Heffernan on dobro and Greg Cahill on banjo confirmed….and more on the way!!T hey have also announced a banjo fast track class for beginners that day, taught by Rich Stillman.

Keep an eye on the Master Class Page on the BBU website for more details, coming soon.

2. The Passim Folk Music & Cultural Center is offering a “Beginning Bluegrass Mandolin with Jiro Kokubu” course.

The Passim Folk Music & Cultural Center
Thursdays at 6:30 p.m. January 14-February 18, 2010
$132 nonmembers / $108 members

Jiro Kokubu, of the David Wax Museum, will teach a bluegrass mandolin class for beginners – no experience necessary. Jiro will start with the very basics, and you’ll learn how to hold a mandolin, how to hold a flatpick, and how to tune your instrument. As you learn to pick and strum, you’ll learn some traditional fiddle tunes and variations for mandolin. Through these songs, Jiro will teach you the chords and scales. At the end of each class, he will give you exercises and tabs to practice each day.

Jiro, a phenomenal multi-instrumentalist from Osaka, Japan, found a home in the Japanese bluegrass community, and on his band’s first tour of America, he met his hero Bill Monroe. He later returned to the United States to study at Berklee College of Music, graduating in 2008. In The David Wax Museum, Jiro’s breath-taking dobro solos and spectacular mandolin ability make him a thrill to take in.

3. Boston Bluegrass Union’s Bluegrass Academy will offer Tony Watt introductory courses for mandolin and guitar (rhythm and lead)

Both courses will be taught through the Boston Bluegrass Union’s Bluegrass Academy, and complete details can be found below, and on the BBU website (http://www.bbu.org/tony_watt_winter_classes.html) and on Tony’s website (http://www.theoriginaltonywatt.com).

Image via CrunchBase

Well, I recently tried to upgrade to WordPress 2.8 and ran into a few snags. I thought I’d share my experience in case it can help someone else!

Upon the manual upload of 2.8 files (follow the instructions here) the site looked great, but I couldn’t login to the back-end.

It turns out that WP 2.8 uses some authentication code/hooks that can conflict with your existing legacy plug-ins. If you can’t login after your 2.8 install, rename your plug-ins folder (which essentially disables them). Then you should be able to login to the back-end.

After some evaluation, I decided that WP 2.8 is not for me, so I reinstalledWP 2.7. Easy right? NO! Guess what? I still couldn’t login to the back end!

Here’s what I figured out…

My hosting provider is 1and1, and a while back I had an issue with some plug-ins because the MySQL DB my WordPress site utilizes is version 4.0 (not 5.0). I had to add a line of code to .htaccess in the root folder [ AddType x-mapp-php5 .php] to have Apache run all .php files as if the MySQL DB was 5.0. It worked great.

When I installed 2.8, it replaced the .htaccess file and erased the hack/fix.

I added that magic line of code [ AddType x-mapp-php5 .php] back into the .htacess file and Voila! Everything works perfectly once again as a 2.7 install.

Hope this helps someone else out!  Good luck!