The Carolina Chocolate Drops' cross-country tour took them to California last week for a number of concerts up and down the coast, from UC Santa Barbara's Campbell Hall on Friday, the Napa Valley Opera House on Saturday, and two shows at San Francisco's Palace of Fine Arts on Sunday as part of the San Francisco Jazz Festival. Prior to the Santa Barbara show, the band stopped by Santa Monica's Village Studios to preview the concert for a select few and give a taste of what's to come on the band's forthcoming Nonesuch debut, due out early next year.

"They were amazing," says Boing Boing's Xeni Jardin, who was able to catch the set. "I have never been so emotionally moved by someone playing a musical jug (and banjos, fiddles, cow bones, and kazoos)."

Jardin goes on to give some idea of what everyone can look forward to next year with the new album. "Boing Boing will be all over it like gravy on grits," she writes. "If you dig R. Crumb, Smithsonian Folkways recordings of pre-blues and pre-bluegrass banjo music, and love folks who bring new life to authentic American music, you will flip out."

After the main event in the studio, band member Dom Flemons stepped aside for still more music making, this time with guitarist Blind Boy Paxton and fiddler Frank Fairfield, and Jardin was there to capture it for Boing Boing Video. The trio "jammed pure, sweet magic for a spell," she writes. You can see for yourself at boingboing.net.