and it sounds like you have plenty of volunteers to help ensure this year will be your best year ever! NC: We do and like you said, it kind of starts out as a business event, and then more fans come out towards the middle of the week and come to the awards show and then it’s more of a fan focus on the weekend. It’s like the CMA Fest, where fans can meet with their favorite artist and talk to them and meet them. We have something called “Celebrity Jams” where Russell Moore and IIIrd Tyme Out will stand in a circle and jam in the hallway and you can get your guitar and walk up there and play with them if you want to. One of the cool things about bluegrass music is that most of our artists are very approachable. They really appreciate their fans and they feel blessed to have careers that are decades long. If you’re really good at bluegrass, you will have fans for your entire career. tDB: You also have some incredible talent performing this year for Wide Open Bluegrass. NC: Oh my gosh, it’s amazing and we fully expect to sellout. Anyone who’s reading this, if they haven’t got their tickets, you need to go to etix.com or call 1-888-GET-IBMA and get your tickets for Wide Open Bluegrass. We’re having Steve Martin with the Steep Canyon Rangers with Edie Brickell, the Punch Brothers, and we’re having a special collaboration of folks who won some of
the first IBMA awards in 1990. Let’s see if I can get all the names right: Tony Rice, Sam Bush, Jerry Douglas, Alison Krauss, Béla Fleck, Del McCoury and Mark Schatz on bass. Mark actually won his first Bass Player of the Year award in ’94, the year I came on staff. We’re so excited about it and then we have a lot of other great bands. The Infamous Stringdusters, Danny Paisley, Della Mae, Blue Highway, Claire Lynch, Dale Ann Bradley, Doyle Lawson, and the Del McCoury Band. It’s just a great lineup. There’s another website that our partners in Raleigh have started, it’s wideopenbluegrass.com and it has some more names like Peter Rowan and the Gibson Brothers, who are the current entertainers of the year. It’s going to be good. tDB: Is there anything else that you’re excited about coming up for IBMA? NC: The Steep Canyon Rangers are hosting the award show and we’re excited about that. Something new that we are doing at the conference this year is that we’re totally changing how we do evening artist showcases. Rather than have just one stage of official IBMA showcases in the convention hall and then also have showcases promoted by members and other independent folks around town, we decided to avoid schedule conflicts and just join forces. We’ll have a stage in the convention center for folks who don’t want to walk around town on Tuesday and Wednesday night from 6 to 10:00 pm, but we’ll also have six different stages around town. There’s an old church, an Irish pub, and four different clubs and they’re all pretty much in walking distance, but they have something called the R-Line, which is their free bus system, so you can hop on the bus or walk around. There will be music on Tuesday and Wednesday night from 6:00 pm to 2 in the morning, and then on Thurs-
day after the awards show and Friday and Saturday after the main stage acts finish, from 10:00 pm to 2:00 am at all these stages in town. It’s called the Bluegrass Ramble, which we borrowed from a Bill Monroe mandolin song title, because we’re just going to ramble around town and hear great bands. You’ll have either a business conference name badge or for the folks who live in town, who work or go to school during the day till 5, they can buy a showcase wristband that will get them into any of these venues all week long. We’ll have 30 official showcase bands that are juried showcase acts from IBMA who have applied to showcase with us, and they will play two or three times during the week and we’ll also have some co-sponsors. KCA Artists, which is Keith Cases’ company, is one and so is MerleFest. They’ll be previewing the acts that are going to be playing at their festival in 2014. Class Act Entertainment and some record labels are involved. It’s going to be a real strong lineup of music, a smorgasbord of bluegrass. They’ll be more music than ever. There’s always been a lot of music at the World of Bluegrass and a lot of jamming, but there will be more showcases and more stages and more venues and it will be very much a celebration for the whole town. It will be bluegrass week for the city of Raleigh and for all of us industry folks. The reason we have showcases is so that we can showcase emerging artists or veteran bands who maybe have a new lead singer, new product, or a new album to plug to radio, the press, or to event producers. We’ll have a very wide spectrum of bands performing. It’ll be a great place to check out bands and we’re very excited about it! APD Radio station members can find out more and help promote IBMA’s upcoming World Of Bluegrass Events here: AirPlayDirect.com/music/psa/