Carolina Chocolate Drops, whose new album, Leaving Eden, was release on vinyl yesterday, are featured in a new piece on PBS Newshour's Art Beat that examines the roots of their music. Watch the piece here along with a recent performance at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. Carolina Chocolate Drops "push an appreciation of home grown songs into brand new territory," explains The Morton Report. "It's not unlike jazz musicians who take popular music into the stratosphere. Carolina Chocolate Drops have essentially erased the rulebook and allowed freedom to become their watchword."
Carolina Chocolate Drops, whose new album, Leaving Eden, was released on vinyl yesterday, are featured in a new piece on PBS Newshour's Art Beat that examines the roots of their music. "Fiddle and banjo music today can seem antiquated, pulled from a time capsule of early Americana, but the Carolina Chocolate Drops want you to know they are more than just a young band with an old-time sound," says Art Beat. The show spoke with band members Dom Flemons and Rhiannon Giddens after the Chocolate Drops' recent performance at the Library of Congress's Coolidge Auditorium in Washington, DC. Watch the piece below as well as a clip from the performance, via pbs.org.
Carolina Chocolate Drops "push an appreciation of home grown songs into brand new territory," says The Morton Report's Bill Bentley in a review of Leaving Eden. "It's not unlike jazz musicians who take popular music into the stratosphere. Carolina Chocolate Drops have essentially erased the rulebook and allowed freedom to become their watchword."
Bentley sees in the band a bridge from the past to the future in ways beyond their choice of repertoire. "There are times in the evolution of American music when a new light gets turned on," he writes. "In the new world, what groups like this and others are doing is grabbing the past and shaking it into the future. It's a recurrent occurrence and can be counted on to jack up the excitement level for those who want to go there."
Read the complete review at themortonreport.com.
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Carolina Chocolate Drops return to the road starting next week, bringing their tour to the West Coast, with performances in Portland, Seattle, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. For details and ticket links, go to nonesuch.com/on-tour.
To pick up a copy of Leaving Eden, head to the Nonesuch Store, where CD and vinyl orders include the album as high-quality, 320 kbps MP3s at checkout; the album is also available to purchase there as MP3s and FLAC lossless files.
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Watch the PBS Newshour Art Beat piece here:
Watch Carolina Chocolate Drops' Sweet Old-time Sound on PBS. See more from PBS NewsHour.
Watch the Library of Congress performance clip from PBS Newshour here:
Watch Carolina Chocolate Drops Perform at the Library of Congress on PBS. See more from PBS NewsHour.
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