Berkeley’s own Laurie Lewis – Grammy winner, bluegrass trailblazer, singer and fiddler extraordinaire. Not only has the International Bluegrass Music Association twice named Laurie the Female Vocalist of the Year – not only did she win a Grammy for her contribution to True Life Blues: the Songs of Bill Monroe – but she also graduated from Berkeley High. Since graduation, she’s recorded more than 20 albums – with the Good Ol’ Persons, Grant Street, Kathy Kallick, and her current band Laurie Lewis & the Right Hands, as well as several solo projects – and is now working with many talented new artists, helping them find their way in the recording business.

Tom Rozum, a native New Englander, first joined forces with Laurie in 1986 as an original member of Grant Street, and may well be the rightest of all the Right Hands. He and Laurie collaborated on a beautiful, Grammy-nominated album of duets, The Oak and the Laurel, and he also has released a wonderful solo album, Jubilee, recorded with an all-star cast of musicians including Laurie, Mike Marshall, Herb Pederson, and Darol Anger.

The shimmering voice of Oakland’s Linda Tillery has powered many of the Bay Area’s most popular bands over the past four decades. A central figure in the emerging women’s music movement in the 1970s and 80s, Linda was also a founding member of Bobby McFerrin’s vocal ensemble Voicestra. She currently leads the Cultural Heritage Choir, performing African American roots music.

Berkeley’s Barbara Higbie is a master of piano and fiddle who composes beautiful music and sings like a dream. She’s been nominated for a Grammy award, won Bammy awards, performed on more than 65 albums, and released four solo albums, as well as two albums with Teresa Trull and three with Montreux, the band she co-founded with Darol Anger. In the words of the Los Angeles Times, she’s a “jolt of bright sunlight” – and everyone in the audience feels her warmth.

Nina Gerber and Chris Webster have been making music together for more than 25 years, and they finally got around to releasing an album of gorgeous duets, Apple Blossom Lane, featuring Chris’s bluesy, jazzy, soulful voice and Nina’s incomparable guitar accompaniment, always surprising, yet always so exactly right. They take their time with each song, playing with possibilities, exploring depths, arriving at moments of rare beauty and transcendence. If you’ve ever heard Nina before, you know she always brings out the best in the musicians around her, and Chris’s best is spectacularly good – her “magic derives from those ineffable qualities of vocal grain, emotional nuance, timing, and phrasing possessed by the truly great and moving singers of any style,” says the Oakland Tribune. This is a duo that delivers the goods!