Other BMI artists performing throughout the three-day music fest include Sheryl Crow, the Pixies, American Analog Set, Phish's Trey Anastasio, Endochine, Pat Green, Reckless Kelly, Solomon Burke, Cake, Ryan Adams, the Blind Boys of Alabama, Mindy Smith, Rosanne Cash and My Morning Jacket.

The ACL Festival focuses on alternative country and roots music and will present more than 130 bands on eight stages over three days. The Festival takes its name from the award-winning PBS series that has been showcasing live music for almost 30 years. Produced by Capital Sports & Entertainment, this year's stage sponsors also include SBC, HEB, Heineken, Cingular Wireless, Austin Ventures LP, Capital Metropolitan Transportation Authority and Bank of America.

BMI Singer/Songwriter Stage Schedule:

Friday, September 17
11:30-12:00 Kacy Crowley
1:10-1:50 Willy Mason
3:10-3:50 Marc Broussard
5:10-5:50 The Honorary Title
7:10-7:50 J.T. Van Zandt

J.T. Van Zandt	Willy Mason	Marc Broussard

Kacy Crowley	The Honorary Title

Saturday, September 18
11:30-12:00 The Greencards
1:10-1:50 Deadman
3:10-3:50 Trish Murphy
5:10-5:50 Holly Williams
7:10-7:50 Monte Montgomery

Jason White	Deadman

Monte Montgomery	Trish Murphy	Holly Williams

Sunday, September 19
11:20-11:50 Davis Raines
12:55-1:35 Samantha Stollenwerck
2:40-3:20 Papa Mali
4:40-5:20 Bobby Bare, Jr.
6:40-7:20 Jason White

Davis Raines	Samantha Stollenwerck	Papa Mali

Bobby Bare, Jr.	The Greencards

In the years since that first Grammy, though, Krauss and her stellar band, Union Station, have won a few more across the acoustic music spectrum: five of them for Best Bluegrass Album and one each for Best Female Country Vocal Performance and Best Group Country Performance. She’s won a couple for playing that fiddle; several for singing, and two as producer for albums with The Cox Family and Nickel Creek. All told, she’s won 17, making her the Recording academy’s most awarded female artist. She’s also won five CMA awards, racked up nine IBMA wins and heaping handful of other honors, including two from Britain and one from Canada.

All this and she’s a mere 32 years old.

It helps to remember that Krauss was, after all, a child prodigy fiddler — she was the Illinois state fiddling champion before puberty set in. She got her first record deal at 14, released her first album at 16, and when she became a member of the Grand Ole Opry in 1993, she was the first bluegrass artist to do so in nearly 30 years.

In addition to that prodigious talent, it’s a safe bet that another key to Krauss’s success is her profound respect for the song . Even back in 1990, when questioned about her departure from the traditional bluegrass instrumentation on some cuts from that first Grammy-winning album, with arrangements softened and a piano showing up where a banjo might have been, the teenager told Newsweek : “I wasn’t into doing something different, but songs as good as ‘That Makes One of Us’ deserve to be catered to.”

That attention to the song helped propel Krauss to double-platinum status with 1995’s Now That I’ve Found You — A Collection , sales unheard of in the bluegrass world, and her next five albums all went gold or platinum.

Early on, Krauss put two high-end singers, Dolly Parton and Lou Gramm, in the category of the world’s best vocalists, a hallowed club she would soon join thanks to her own high-lonesome, pitch-perfect warbling. She’s since sung with such diverse artists as Yo-Yo Ma, Dar Williams, Tommy Shaw, Alan Jackson and Phish. She’s contributed her distinctive voice to music for television, including Crossing Jordan and Buffy the Vampire Slayer ; and to numerous films, including Happy Texas , O Brother, Where Art Thou? , Mona Lisa Smile , and the recent Cold Mountain , which led ther to her latest pinnacle at the Academy Awards, performing two songs from that film, “My Ain True Love” and “The Scarlet Tide.”]]> 2004-05-19T18:00:00-05:00 http://www.bmi.com/musicworld/entry/200065 Artists, Phish, Musical Styles, Rock, Musicworld, Feature, Type, Important When Phish released its first major label recording in the early ’90s, critics hailed the Vermont foursome as forerunners in an improvisational "new hippie" movement. But when the band quietly dispersed in 2000 for a hiatus of indeterminate length, Phish left a musical void no other band could fill.

So it came as welcome news recently when Phish announced it was finally swimming out of self-imposed exile to spawn its first album in two years. Featuring 12 new compositions, Round Room essentially places Phish fans in the room with the band as they rediscover their unique chemistry.

Phish has always been an inspiring band, but Round Room takes their trademark spontaneity to dizzying new heights. Just weeks after their reunion, the band recorded 20 new songs with the notion of revisiting the material in the spring, when they would convene to record a "proper" album. But the initial studio sessions yielded such good results, the band couldn't see how they could improve them. So Phish elected to winnow the album down to 12 songs and release Round Room as-is.

Arriving on the heels of Phish's trial separation, it's not surprising that Round Room features a number of songs that address the complications of relationships. On the contemplative "Friday," Anastasio sings: "I crashed, I burned, but then I learned to keep my eye on you."

"To make an album so close to the moment of conception is pretty cool," bassist Mike Gordon says. "Because we're still discovering the songs, I think our sense of wonder comes out. It doesn't surprise me that there would be good stuff in that moment. There are many sections in these songs like the cycling chords at the end of ‘Friday’ that remind me how the band is close to my emotional center."

Round Room has Phish fans breathing a sigh of relief -- it was beginning to look as if the members were becoming comfortable pursuing solo projects. Guitarist and vocalist Trey Anastasio released a self-titled 2002 debut solo album and toured with his band Oysterhead, while keyboardist Page McConnell released an album of jazz-inflected grooves with the trio Vida Blue. Drummer Jon Fishman made the rounds with his band Pork Tornado and bassist Gordon collaborated with guitarist Leo Kottke.

But Round Room is the work of an audibly reinvigorated band. "We ripped right into it," says guitarist Anastasio of the new album. "It was all new and fresh, and that was important 'cause that's what we wanted. The thing that struck me was that lots of life had gone by, but there was still continuity to it."

Tremendously instrumental in establishing the current "jam band" craze, Phish proved capable of attracting a single-event audience of 75,000 at their pre-hiatus millennium concert weekend in Florida. Now reunited, the band seems less concerned about drawing similarly large numbers as with playing together again. "We're back, simple as that," says keyboardist McConnell. "We went away and came back recharged, which was the goal."]]> 2003-01-14T17:00:00-05:00 http://www.bmi.com/musicworld/entry/233219 Avant, Flatt and Scruggs, Fleck, Béla, Phish, Bluegrass, Country, Jazz, Feature It wouldn't be an exaggeration to state that genre-bending banjoist Béla Fleck has revolutionized his instrument's place in contemporary music. With his eclectic combo the Flecktones, Fleck - who recently won Grammy Awards in the categories of Best Contemporary Jazz Album (for his album Outbound) and Best Country Instrumental Performance (for "Leaving Cottondale," a duet with fellow banjo virtuoso Alison Brown) - has consistently taken the instrument into brave new worlds, exploring a playfully adventurous stew of bluegrass, jazz, pop, funk, rock, country and even classical styles, and winning a large and devoted audience in the process.

The New York-born, Nashville-based Fleck, named after classical composer Béla Bartok, became fascinated with the banjo in his teens, switching from guitar after hearing Flatt and Scruggs' Beverly Hillbillies theme. After studying at New York's High School of Music and Art, he won acclaim at a young age in the bluegrass world, while exploring the instrument's potential for jazz improvisation.

After stints with the Boston group Tasty Licks and the Kentucky band Spectrum, Fleck joined the influential progressive-bluegrass quartet New Grass Revival in 1982 and remained with the group until it split up the end of the decade. When the opportunity to assemble his own combo arose in 1989, he launched the Flecktones with bassist Victor Wooten, his electronic-percussionist brother Roy "Future Man" Wooten, and multi-instrumentalist Howard Levy; Levy was subsequently supplanted by saxophonist Jeff Coffin. Through a series of increasingly popular albums, the group's eponymous 1990 debut, Flight of the Cosmic Hippo, UFO-TOFU, Three Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and Live Art, Fleck and company have forged a musical identity that's both distinctive and unpredictable, integrating a seemingly bottomless well of textures, styles and influences.

As they've continued to push stylistic boundaries, the Flecktones have won a large and devoted fan following drawn from all ends of the musical spectrum. They maintain a particularly strong constituency in the jam-band scene, thanks to the musicians' penchant for exotic improvisation.

"Sometimes when people credit Dave Matthews and Phish for our audience, we say 'Yeah, it's helping'," Fleck recently told Down Beat. "But what's really going on is years of playing a couple hundred gigs a year and building an audience from scratch and learning to please an audience so they'll want to come back. The more diverse the audience is, the better. If you've got people who would normally be jazz fans sitting in the same room with people who love bluegrass, some funk fans who love Victor [and] some Deadheads, it turns into this roomful of happy people who are all real different."

Despite the Flecktones' commercial success, the band's leader continues to branch out into a diverse array of projects in a variety of genres. The most recent Flecktones album, Outbound, is his first under a new Sony contract that calls for Fleck to also release classical and jazz projects. The musician's inclusive vision is reflected in the fact that Outbound augments the quartet with a dizzyingly diverse array of guest performers, including Shawn Colvin, Yes vocalist Jon Anderson, veteran avant-rock guitarist Adrian Belew, oboe player Paul McCandless, and keyboardist John Medeski of jazz jammers Medeski, Martin & Wood), Tuvan throat-singer Ondar and steel-pan drummer Andy Narell, as well as the tabla player and string quartet featured on the Flecktones' spirited reading of Aaron Copland's "Hoedown."

"The fact that we allow taping of our concerts has changed our approach to making records," Fleck recently explained to Sonicnet. "What's the incentive of buying a record of the same stuff without an audience to get the band excited? The point of the record is giving the audience something that they can't get live. And it's created an opportunity for us to go into the studio and explore."

Even the album-ending instrumental track "First Tube" is just under seven minutes, significantly shorter than the jams Phish has become famous for, both on albums and in live performances. With Trey Anastasio on guitar and vocals, Jon Fishman on drums, Mike Gordon on bass, and Page McConnell on keyboards, Phish delivers rocking cuts such as "Farmhouse" and "Heavy Things" that have full radio potential, which is uncommon for the band. However, they maintain their usual sense of humor in their lyrics, most of which are written by Tom Marshall.

This, of course, does not mean Phish will not be their usual selves on their tour, which recently kicked-off at Radio City Music Hall in New York. On May 21-22, 6th Avenue was converted into a scene normally reserved for the parking lot. On a street dominated by commuters in suits just a few hours before, fans in tie-dye, concert t-shirts, and even tuxedoes and evening gowns (the results of an Internet-created phenomenon known as "Project Phormal") celebrated the band's short stay in New York. For those who managed to get tickets, the party continued inside, creating a scene not at all typical for Radio City.

Aside from touring, the band will promote Farmhouse on their web site, www.phish.com, and will most likely receive a slew of "free" promotion from their fan sites. Called "the world's most wired group" by Rolling Stone, Phish has taken full advantage of the Internet, using it to sell their "dry goods," promote their music and build a strong following of tie-dye-wearing, computer-savvy Phish-heads.