Rob Wasserman

Rob Wasserman is an American, Grammy Award winning upright bass player and NEA grant winning composer, who has played and recorded with a wide variety of musicians including Bruce Cockburn, Elvis Costello, Ani di Franco, Jerry Garcia, David Grisman, Rickie Lee Jones, Mark Morris, Van Morrison, Aaron Neville, Lou Reed, Pete Seeger, Jules Shear, Studs Terkel, Bob Weir, Brian Wilson, Chris Whitley, Neil Young, Jackson Browne, Laurie Anderson, Stephen Perkins Banyan, Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo and Ratdog

He is best known for his own work on the trilogy of albums, Solo, Duets, and Trios.

Life and career

Wasserman started playing violin and did not graduate to the bass until after his teenage years. He studied at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music where he studied composing with John Adams and double bass with San Francisco Symphony bassists.

Early on, he was playing with Van Morrison, Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo and the David Grisman Quintet. His 1983 album, Solo won Downbeat Magazine's Record of the Year award. Subsequent albums, Duets and Trios saw Wasserman engage with other musicians, such as Bobby McFerrin, Rickie Lee Jones, Cheryl Bentyne, Lou Reed, Stéphane Grappelli, Jerry Garcia, Brian Wilson, Willie Dixon, Branford Marsalis, and Elvis Costello.

Bob Weir

Robert Hall "Bob" Weir (WEER; born October 16, 1947) is an American singer, songwriter, and guitarist, most recognized as a founding member of the Grateful Dead. After the Grateful Dead disbanded in 1995, Weir performed with The Other Ones, later known as The Dead, together with other former members of the Grateful Dead. Weir also founded and played in several other bands during and after his career with the Grateful Dead, including Kingfish, the Bob Weir Band, Bobby and the Midnites, Scaring the Children, RatDog, Furthur, co-led by former Grateful Dead bassist Phil Lesh, and Dead & Company, formed with former Grateful Dead drummers Bill Kreutzmann and Mickey Hart.

During his career with the Grateful Dead, Weir played mostly rhythm guitar and sang many of the band's rock-n-roll tunes. As a guitarist, he is known for his unique style of complex voiceleading, bringing unusual depth and a new approach to the role of rhythm guitar expression.

Early life

Weir was born in San Francisco, California to John (Jack) Parber and a fellow college student who later gave him up, and was raised by his adoptive parents, Frederic Utter and Eleanor Cramer Weir, in the suburb of Atherton. He began playing guitar at age thirteen after less successful experimentation with the piano and the trumpet. He had trouble in school because of undiagnosed dyslexia and he was expelled from nearly every school he attended, including The Menlo School in Atherton, California and Fountain Valley School in Colorado. At Fountain Valley he met John Perry Barlow, who later wrote the lyrics to a number of Grateful Dead songs.

Mark O'Connor

Mark O'Connor (born August 5, 1961 in Seattle, Washington) is an American classical , bluegrass, jazz and country violinist, fiddler, composer and music teacher. O'Connor's music is wide-ranging and critically acclaimed, and he has received numerous awards for both his playing and his composition. As a teenager he won national string instrument championships for his virtuoso playing of the guitar and mandolin as well as the fiddle. His mentors include Texas fiddler Benny Thomasson who taught O'Connor to fiddle as a teenager, French jazz violinist Stéphane Grappelli with whom O'Connor toured as a teenager, and guitarist Chet Atkins.

O'Connor currently resides in New York City.

Early life

Mark O'Connor was a child prodigy who won national titles on the fiddle, guitar and mandolin as a teenager. In 1975 at age thirteen, O'Connor won the WSM (AM), Tennessee, and Grand Ole Opry sponsored Grand Masters Fiddle Championships in Nashville against amateur and professional competitors of all ages. That same year he won another national championship, this time on acoustic guitar, at the National Flat Pick Guitar Championship in Winfield, Kansas. At age 19, O'Connor won the Buck White International Mandolin Championship in Kerrville, Texas. He is a four-time grand champion (1979, 1980, 1981 and 1984) at the National Oldtime Fiddler's Contest in Weiser, Idaho.