Rob Ickes

A Northern California native, Rob Ickes moved to Nashville in 1992 and joined Blue Highway, the highly esteemed bluegrass band, as a founding member in 1994. He is recognized as one of the most innovative Dobro players on the scene today, contributing signature technique and greatly expanding the boundaries of the instrument's sonic and stylistic territory. He won the International Bluegrass Music Association's Dobro Player of the Year award for a record-setting eleventh time in 2009; IBMA notes that he is the most awarded instrumentalist in the history of the IBMA awards.

As an active session player and touring musician, he has collaborated with a wide range of musicians, including Charlie Haden, Merle Haggard, Earl Scruggs, Tony Rice, David Grisman, Alison Krauss, Willie Nelson, David Lee Roth, Dolly Parton, Patty Loveless, Peter Rowan, Claire Lynch, and Mary Chapin Carpenter.

The youngest dobro player on The Great Dobro Sessions (Jerry Douglas & Tut Taylor, producers), which won the 1994 Grammy for Best Bluegrass Album, he was also on the Alison Krauss & The Cox Family album, I Know Who Holds Tomorrow, which won the 1994 Grammy for Best Southern Gospel. His most recent release is a dobro-piano jazz album, Road Song (ResoRevolution 2009); he has also released four acclaimed solo albums on Rounder, eight albums with Blue Highway (Rounder, Ceili, Rebel) and a self-titled CD with Three Ring Circle, comprising Rob, Andy Leftwich and Dave Pomeroy (Earwave).

Rob is also a gifted resonator guitar teacher; in 2007, he founded ResoSummit, a three-day annual instructional event in Nashville, featuring leading Dobro players and luthiers as faculty.

Rob Ickes’ fifth solo album is a boundary breaking album with wondrous romps and intimate dobro-piano dialogues that reach into the emotional core of 10 great jazz standards. Jazz pianist Michael Alvey's intricate bass lines and percussive right-hand chordal punctuations have the energy of a full ensemble, while Ickes lays down melodies with precision before the duo launches into breathtaking improvisational rides. Robinella, a perfectly empathetic singer, contributes a playful give-and-take with dobro and piano, partly inspired by the great Ella Fitzgerald-Louis Armstrong collaborations.

Robinella

Robinella’s career began with a sort of luck that rarely comes to most artists within their lifetime.  What started out as a simple husband-and-wife duo fresh out of college quickly grew to a full-fledged band that blended Bluegrass, Country and Jazz. The combination of Robinella's honey-sweet vocals with violin, mandolin, bass, drums and piano captivated audiences, thus creating the ever popular Robinella & the CC Stringband.

They released their first album, self-titled Robinella and The CC Stringband, in 2000, which quickly followed, No Saint, No Prize in 2001. Both were on the independent label Big Gulley Records. With a few simple twists of fate, what followed was a whirlwind of rapid success - Columbia Records liked what they heard and signed Robinella in 2002. The label took seven songs from the band’s two prior albums and released them as the CD Blanket for My Soul and then released a full album in 2003, Robinella and the CC Stringband. This led to a national tour including opening for such artists as Bob Dylan, Willie Nelson, Earl Scruggs, Nickel Creek, Robert Earl Keen, Kasey Chambers, Del McCoury and Rodney Crowell as well as an appearance on “Late Night with Conan O’Brien” and a music video on CMT for their hit single, “Man Over”.  She also performed on NPR’s “Mountain Stage,” appeared on the Grand Ole Opry and performed on PBS’s “SoundStage.” In 2006, Robinella was nominated for “Emerging Artist of the Year” at the Americana Music Awards and released her fourth album, “Solace for the Lonely”, on Dualtone Records in Nashville.

But then life, as it has a tendency to do, threw a few curveballs her way. She became a mom and a couple of years later, she and her husband/musical partner split up with a new record almost completed. Exhausted and somewhat disillusioned with the industry and its promises, it was time to regroup, redefine and get back to her roots. So she returned to her home, the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains, and got back in touch with what she truly wanted – love, family, friendship, music, art, truth.

With that comes her latest release, “Fly Away Bird”, her most mature work. However, within the melancholy and touches of sadness there is not true despair. For such a voice — that dazzling, warm, bright-as-summer-sunshine soprano — to even communicate it would most likely defy certain laws of emotional physics. No, instead, this album, beneath the disappointments, she is brimming with optimism — with hope. You can feel it, and even more important than that, you believe — because she believes, and because her music is so honest and so genuine and so forthright that you just can't help but knowing that this is an artist who still finds life to be magical.