The band will kick off the year with a five-city swing through Brazil before returning to Europe where they’re booked to play 37 dates so far including shows in Brussels, Berlin, Athens.

JT’s calendar is also heavy with festival appearances this year including gigs at the Lovely Days Festival in St. Polten, Austria, the Hohentwiel Festival in Singen, Germany, the Wickham Festival in Wickham, U.K., and the Crozon Festival in Brest, France.

The North American section of the tour gets rolling September 24 at the South Alberta Jubilee Auditorium in Calgary, and includes 20 dates in theatres and auditoriums across the U.S. and Canada, including the Royal Theatre in Victoria, B.C., Seattle’s Paramount Theatre, the Wells Fargo Center for the Arts in Santa Rosa, Calif., Denver’s Temple Buell Theatre and New York’s Hammerstein Ballroom.

Ticket information for all shows is available at www.j-tull.com.

Besides frontman Ian Anderson and long time Tull guitarist Martin Barre the tour will feature a revolving line up of musicians including John O’Hara, David Goodier, James Duncan, Doane Perry, Florian Ophle, Anna Phoebe and Ann Marie Calhoun.

Apart from some of the festival dates, most Tull shows in 2007 will be either all acoustic or a mixture of acoustic and electric.

For those who still want their Tull loud, Anderson explained the motivation behind staging the shows with his typical wry sense of humor in a message on the band’s web site.

“As you might guess, my old ears have been ringing for most of the 39 years of Tull touring and, although we are far from being the loudest band in town, it has still been pretty punishing over the years,” Anderson wrote.

“The pleasures of the many quieter shows (on stage that is – still pretty loud for the audience) which I have been doing more recently has meant no more fuzzy hearing and headaches after the shows. The difficulty in hearing myself in the midst of relative cacophony has been replaced by a much nicer way of doing business with you. Kept me in better humour too as some have noticed. Not that I’m cranky or anything. Who, me?”