Cary Black

Cary Black is a bassist, teacher, vocalist, and producer who lives in Olympia, Washington.  Described by Alan Senauke in Sing Out! magazine as “a musician's musician,” Cary is at home in a wide variety of musical settings.

His performance and recording credits include work with Laurindo Almeida, Ernestine Anderson, Tex Beneke, The Boys of the Lough, Bob Crosby, Nokie Edwards, Dan Hicks, The Kingston Trio, Laurie Lewis, Rose Maddox, Mollie O'Brien, Eddie Pennington, Johnny Ray, Kay Starr, Eddie “Cleanhead” Vinson, Ernie Watts, and Claude “Fiddler” Williams.

Cary has toured extensively, appearing at festivals and concerts throughout North America, Europe, and Asia.  He has made numerous radio appearances including the Grand Ole Opry and A Prairie Home Companion; and he has performed on the PBS, ABC, FOX, and TNN television networks.  During the period when Cary played and sang with Laurie Lewis and Grant Street, the band was awarded the Song of the Year and Entertainers of the Year honors by the International Bluegrass Music Association.

Cary taught music theory and improvisation for six years at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, and has taught upright bass for twenty years at the Puget Sound Guitar Workshop.  He has also taught bass at the California Coast  Music Camp, Greater Yellowstone Music Camp, Bluegrass at the Beach, B.C. Bluegrass Workshop, Sound Acoustic Music Camp, and Wintergrass Academy.

Flip Breskin

Flip Breskin is a Bellingham, Washington-based guitarist and singer who co-founded the Puget Sound Guitar Workshop (37 years and counting) and has taught fingerstyle guitar to a generation and a half of Washington pickers. The first time she heard Libba Cotten ("Freight Train"), she realized that she had found something worth doing that she could learn to do, and has been doing it ever since. While Libba was still alive, she would stay at Fl!p's house whenever she toured the Northwest. Flip is a song-catcher extraordinaire, an extremely clean and lyrical fingerstyle guitarist, and a musical mover and shaker from away back.

In concert, she plays the sweetest instrumentals ever found, and the songs she sings are deep and thoughtful. 

Dave Firestine

Dave Firestine is probably best known as the jam leader at the Carp Camp, an institution at the Walnut Valley Festival in Winfield, KS.  The Carp Camp is the center of the universe for fiddle tune jamming, where one can hear Irish, old-time, New England and French Canadian tunes from the crack of noon to the wee hours of the morning.  Dave's style is eclectic, incorporating a blend of old time and Irish styles. He is especially fond of tunes that have a unique twist, or sets that introduce interesting changes of tempo or keys to perk up the listener's ears.

Dave plays mandolin, banjo, bouzouki, bodhran, and guitar with three bands around Tucson, AZ: Round the House, the Privy Tippers and The New Potatoes.  As a Roster Artist for the Arizona Commission on the Arts, he teaches workshops in schools.  He also co-hosts the Tucson Irish session and old time/contra dance music session and leads jams and teaches workshops at the Tucson Folk Festival, Sharlot Hall Music Festival, the Dewey Dulcimer Festival and the CTMS Summer Solstice Music Dance and Storytelling Festival.

Go to Dave's home page.

Matt Flinner

Multi-instrumentalist Matt Flinner has made a career out of playing acoustic music in new ways. Starting out as a banjo prodigy who was playing bluegrass festivals before he entered his teens, Matt later took up the mandolin, won the banjo contest at Winfield in 1990, and won the mandolin award there the following year.

Originally from Utah, Matt moved to Nashville in 1999 and is widely considered one of the most creative mandolin players on the acoustic scene. His two solo albums for Compass Records, The View from Here and Latitude, both feature bluegrass stalwarts Todd Phillips, David Grier, Stuart Duncan, Jerry Douglas and Darol Anger, and received high critical acclaim.

Matt tours with Phillips and Grier (in Phillips, Grier and Flinner) and the Modern Mandolin Quartet, as well as with his own Matt Flinner Acoustic Trio and Matt Flinner Quartet, which released its Walking on the Moon CD on Compass in 2002.

Bluegrass Now said “Flinner provides the next logical evolutionary step to David Grisman's unique dawg style, and does it with a nod to the past and a vision of the future."

Gerald Jones

This will be Gerald's fifth year teaching at the Colorado Roots Music Camp, and he's a perennial favorite.  A "multi-instrumental genius," according to Joe Carr, Gerald is a highly-respected player on banjo, guitar and mandolin, and has been teaching just about as many years as he's been playing.  Many of his students have gone on to be highly-successful musicians in their own right, including Emily (Erwin) Robison of the Dixie Chicks. 

A living library of cool riffs, Gerald offers such topics as “25 Banjo Licks You Must Know,” and “How Not To Sound Bad and Other Musical Survival Tips” in his teaching.  He's been a favorite instructor at Camp Bluegrass for many years, and at his own Acoustic Music Camp.

He’s earned both second- and third–place titles in the National Bluegrass Banjo championship, which he claims add up to a first place.

Gerald jams night and day, and is always teaching, whether in the class or out.

Tim May

Tim May is one of today’s hottest flatpickers, period.  For fifteen years, he performed with the progressive bluegrass band Crucial Smith, playing most of the high-profile festivals in the country including Telluride, Winfield and Winterhawk.  In 2002-2003 he toured with Patty Loveless in support of her bluegrass albums Mountain Soul and White Snow: A Mountain Christmas.  In 2005, he recorded on Charlie Daniels’ album Songs from the Long Leaf Pines, and was solo guitarist on the Grammy-nominate track I’ll Fly Away.

Tim has also toured with John Cowan Band, performed at the Grand Ole Opry as a member of Mike Snider’s Old Time String Band and recently played on the all-star Rounder recording Moody Bluegrass: a Nashville Tribute to the Moody Blues, of which Mark Hurley of Higher and Higher, the Moody Blues fan magazine, said “The jaw-dropping guitar solo on The Voice would cause Eddie Van Halen to week from insecurity.” 

Tim's taught at Nashville Guitar College, South Plains College and Nashcamp, and is a national clinician for Breedlove guitars.

Of his playing, Pat Flynn said “Tim always says that I influenced him, but the truth is that I’ve learned something every time I play with him.  I owe him a lot,” and Dan Crary said simply, “Tim May has just become one of my favorite guitar players.”

See a few videos of Tim.

Go to Tim's home page.

Penny Nichols

Penny Nichols is an award winning, 3-time Grammy nominated singer/songwriter and vocal arranger who has been performing and teaching since 1966. Her most recent ventures include her new series of Harmony and Background Vocal arranging lessons on CD, a new book/CD: The Eight Voyages of Nep, and teaching at Summer Acoustic Music Week camp in New Hampshire and Moab Folk camp in Utah.  She was also the founding director of the nonprofit SummerSongs, Inc., which is going into its 13th year of music camps for songwriters.

Penny started her career as a folk singer in coffeehouses around Orange County, California, sharing the stage with Jackson Browne, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, Linda Ronstadt and the Stone Ponies, Jennifer Warnes, Mary McCaslin and many others.  Between then and now, there's way too much to list, so here are just a few of the more interesting points: she's been a member of Jimmy Buffett's Coral Reefer Band, recorded two albums, wrote and sung commercials for Toyota, earned a doctorate at Harvard University and recorded with Art Garfunkel, Suzi Quatro, Danny O'Keefe, and a host of others.

Raul Reynoso 

Guitarist, singer and composer Raul Reynoso was born in Los Angeles, California.  He started playing bluegrass guitar in 1974 and soon acquired the skills that would earn him two California State Flatpicking Guitar championships as well as many Western regional titles.  Today, he is most noted for his expertise on acoustic guitar and mandolin with a mastery of styles ranging from bluegrass and western swing to ‘30s jazz in the tradition of the legendary Django Reinhardt.

Raul first rose to prominence in the band of banjo virtuoso Larry McNeely, and his three-year stint with the band included one recording and two appearances on the Grand Ole Opry.  The release of Raul’s CD “Royal Street” has brought Raul international acclaim from jazz reviewers in the US, UK and Europe.  The instrumental and compositional skills displayed on his CD have solidified his position as one of the world’s greatest guitarists.  Music critic Jim Hilmar said “When it comes to guitar styles, Raul Reynoso’s clean, lithe, articulate picking technique is to die for.”

Along with John Jorgenson, Raul is one of the pioneers of the Gypsy Jazz movement, and has been nominated Instrumentalist of the Year three times by the Western Music Association. 

Raul has taught privately for over 35 years, and has done workshop and clinics for the last fifteen. He is a mentor at the Booher Family Music Camp, and has done workshops with John Jorgenson for the JazzMasters Workshop.  Raul has also taught Bluegrass workshops with Dan Crary, John Moore, Beppe Gambetta, and Steve Kaufman.

See a few videos of Doug.

Go to Doug's home page

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Cyd Smith

Cyd Smith started out as a classic guitarist, but was lured away early on by the soulfulness and sheer fun of playing American roots music: bluegrass, vintage country, jug band, swing, jazz, and rock & roll. Over the years she has lived in many corners of this country, playing guitar and bass with different bands, including contra dance and swing music in Boston with Matt Glaser and Russ Barenberg, swing with The Wholly Cats, Bob Brozman, and many others in the Northwest, and bluegrass with Laurie Lewis in the Bay Area.

She is also a fine singer/songwriter who has released an album of her own material that features some of the finest musicians on the West Coast. The Bay Area Guardian says “An extremely gifted songwriter from the Northwest, Cyd Smith sometimes sounds like a missing Roche sister on her fine self-produced CD.”

Cyd’s taught for over 20 years at Puget Sound Guitar Workshop, and served several years as a board member there as well. She’s also taught at the California Coast Music Camp, the Georgia Strait Guitar Workshop and the Augusta Heritage Festival. She was a co-founder and administrator of Seattle's Musical Arts Workshop, taught at Rogue Valley Community College in Grant’s Pass, Oregon, and has taught privately over the years as well.

Kailin Yong

Kailin ("Ky-Lynn") Yong has covered more musical ground than most of us cover in three lifetimes.  A few of the high points:

He grew up in the deep south.  Well, Southeast Asia, actually, in Singapore.  At age 13, he won a National Music Competition and was "discovered" by a visiting professor from the Royal Academy of Music in London.  He wanted to attend the Royal Academy, but his parents (and his country) had other plans for him, and he spent another 9 years in Singapore, in school and the army.  He did his graduate study at the Vienna Academy of Music for violin performance and chamber music.

On coming to the US in 1999, he made his first year's living playing in the Bay Area BART stations (subway) while studying the jazz of Stephane Grappelli, the tango of Astor Piazzola and a host of other styles. 

He's studied various improvisational fiddle styles with Art Lande, Darol Anger and Roshan Bhartiya.  He founded the groups Strings of Tao and the award-winning Boulder Acoustic Society, and has integrated his music with various musical styles including modern dance, theater and film. 

In 2004, he was awarded the Daniel Pearl Memorial Violin at the Mark O'Connor Strings conference, and for 2009-2010, he's been awarded an Artist in Residency position for the city of Boulder.

He's dedicated to making peace through music, and to helping others play; he's highly-respected for his teaching, and specifically his ability to help folks get started improvising.