Speaking of Rob Ickes…

He was the subject of a nearly six minute segment on yesterday’s (9/20) All Things Considered, broadcast on the majority of NPR stations all over the US. The piece was produced, voiced and written by our friend Craig Havighurst, IBMA Board member and proprietor of String Theory Media in Nashville.

It is focused on Road Song, the debut CD released on Rob’s ResoRevolution label, a set of piano/dobro duets with Michael Alvey. Havighurst interviews them both about how they met, and came to record together.

You can hear the audio from Craig’s piece on the All Things Considered web site.

I could hear the excitement in Rob Icke’s voice when I spoke with him earlier this week about his recent trip to Israel.

He and pianist Michael Alvey made the trip to perform at the Red Sea Jazz Festival in Eliat, a gorgeous resort town in southern Israel – at the northern tip of the Red Sea. Ickes and Alvey collaborated on Rob’s latest CD, Road Song, a set of duets on a mix of jazz standards and new compositions.

Rob shared the story of how a resonator guitarist from Nashville got the call to perform with jazz legends like John Scofield and Paquito D’Rivera halfway around the world.

“There was a guy, Ori, at ResoSummit last year who is Israeli, and he somehow got one of the first mixed cuts from Road Song to Avishai Cohen, the director of the festival. He loved the track, and invited us to perform based solely on that one cut.

It was a really wild trip. I left on Sunday (8/23), we played that Tuesday and Wednesday, and got back on Thursday – plus I had Blue Highway shows the Saturday before and the Friday after!”

Even with that sort of nerve-wracking schedule, Rob said that the trip was worth every drop of sweat. He tells us that Eliat Harbor was beautiful, and that the hotel  where they stayed was magnificent.

“Everything was great… the sound was perfect. I was seeing all these heavy jazz cats and started thinking, ‘What are we doing here?’ but people really dug what we were doing. There was a jam stage just outside the hotel where people were playing every night until 6:00 a.m. I didn’t bother getting much sleep.

After our first show Tuesday night, I had a workshop Wednesday morning and I figured that no one would be there. But lo and behold, there were 50-60 people there! They were fascinated by the dobro, and wanted to learn all about it. Several young people came up to me afterwards and wanted to find out how they could learn. That had me flashing back to when I was first inspired to play -  those kids had that same look in their eye.

One guy asked if he could just put a pencil under his strings to raise the action to get started, and I laughed and said, “That’s just what I did!’

Our second show was sold out, with more than 1,000 in the venue. Before our second set, the festival director came up to me and said that he really had taken a chance booking us, based just on a recording, and that made me feel so good that they heard something they liked that well. Plus he said that he wanted to have us back.

It wasn’t all work, though. Rob said that he had a chance to hook up with his old college roommate who lives in Israel now, and even got to swim with the fishes, metaphorically speaking of course.

“Our chaperon for that week runs a dolphin park, so we got to hang out with the dolphins and relax at a salt water spa. It was like the Dead Sea – so salty that you float effortlessly in the water. If you laid your head back into the water, you could hear the music they had piped into the pool.

It was a very cool trip.”

You can hear audio samples from Road Song on the site for Rob’s record company, ResoRevolution.

Sarah Hagerman has a a great interview with Tut Taylor up on the Steam Powered Preservation Society web site.

Entitled Snapshots, Tapes and Broken Strings, the article includes a career overview of the noted resonator guitarist who has performed and recorded with John Hartford, Norman Blake, and Clarence and Roland White. Hagerman also touches on Tut’s reputation as a luthier and his association with George Gruhn and Randy Wood.

She also covers the time when Tut teamed up with Hartford, Blake and Vassar Clements to create one of the seminal albums in the history of Americana folks music, John Hartford’s Aereo-plane in 1971.

In the midst of this thriving Nashville scene, Hartford, Blake and Clements decided to form a band – The Aereo-plain Band. The resulting album, Aereo-plain, was a ground breaking record. Steering old time traditions down a freewheeling river, with four great musicians at the helm (who were joined by Randy Scruggs on electric bass in the studio), the album organically and lovingly re-examined Americana with quirkiness and warmth, dancing over the boundary lines between heritage and evolution. Often the best things come when you don’t force them, and the work they did on Aereo-plain is certainly evidence of that, still sounding juicy today when that needle hits the vinyl. The relaxed demeanor of the project was inspired by Hartford’s hands-off bandleader approach.

“John was a creative person,” Taylor describes. “He was creative in writing, I don’t know how many books he wrote, but he did write some books. Creative in his music, completely different. He had more rhythm in his soul than any person I’ve ever known. And he was a very free spirited individual. When we got The Aereo-plain Band together, he just told us to play what we felt – if we felt like playing a song to play, if we didn’t feel like playing, not to play. If we wanted to create something or add something to the song, we had liberty to do that. So I think that was one of the reasons that The Aero-plain Band CD has over the years become such sought after music. Because actually, [although] we didn’t know it at the time, we broke the barrier, we broke the mold. What we were playing was different than anything anybody else had ever played. It was a forerunner of the so-called newgrass movement. We didn’t know that then, that was not in our attention.”

“When all four of us got together we kind of played off of each other,” he continues. “One of us inspired the other and would inform another to play better or to play different or to be inventive, to just let the bars down and go for it. [Hartford] was very enjoyable to work with and it was a great experience. The only sad thing about it, he recorded back then on Warner Brothers, and Warner Brothers never did push the album, it never got out there in the marketplace like it should have been. But even then, over the years it’s gained a lot of notoriety.”

Read the full piece at spps.org.

Mike Witcher, current reso man with Missy Raines & The New Hip, has published a second instructional book for resonator guitar.

Resonator Guitar: 20 Bluegrass Jam Favorites contains precisely what the title suggests. Mike has created intermediate level arrangements for 20 oft-called tunes, and presents them in tablature and on an accompanying audio CD.

The book is spiral bound to lay flat on a music stand and runs to 28 pages, including a forward from Jerry Douglas. Songs include Angelina Baker, Big Mon, Clinch Mountain Backstep, Lonesome Road Blues, Methodist Preacher, Red Wing, Soldiers Joy and many more.

It can be ordered from Mike’s web site, where you can also see the complete list of tunes.

Witcher also offers live online lessons via webcam. Full details can be found on his site – a high speed connection is highly recommended.