Sedona, AZ: Headlining the Sedona Bluegrass Festival is Grammy Winning singer and multi-instrumentalist Tim O'Brien, with the award winning Crystal Creek and Burnett Family Bluegrass Bands. The third Sedona Bluegrass Festival and Residency will take place Wednesday, April 29, through Sunday, May 3, featuring three additional Grammy Award winning acoustic string musicians and guest bands in eleven activities in multiple locations throughout Sedona and northern Arizona.
In the 1980s, O'Brien came to prominence as a member of the bluegrass band Hot Rize. As the band developed so did O’Brien’s solo career as a performer, songwriter, and producer. O’Brien won the Grammy in 2006 for Best Traditional Folk Album with Fiddler’s Green, one of 13 records under his own name, and three with his sister Mollie O'Brien.
“Tim is a favorite among his fellow musicians and his fans are worldwide," said Chamber Music Sedona artistic advisor Mike Marshall. “We’ve worked together at the Telluride Bluegrass Festival as well as our own band NewGrange. Sedona is in for a real treat,” said Marshall.
O’Brien is at a point in his career where you'd think he'd be charging at full speed toward the next big thing, yet O'Brien confounded expectations by doing something else: he took time--and plenty of it--to create the next small thing. His newest recording, Chameleon, is an intimate project that, in its blend of virtuosity, wit and warmth, is unmistakably his. And this time around, it's literally his alone.
"Back in January of 2006, I said to myself, I've got to do something different than flying every which way all year," O'Brien recalls. "And when I got the Grammy award in February, it sort of woke me up. It was so validating, because I'd already been feeling that pushing was not getting me anywhere, that I was just getting worn out and disillusioned--and when you get disillusioned doing what I do, something's wrong, because it's a great job. So winning the award was like hearing that I have been doing something that I've got a body of stuff to rest on. And by June, I was telling people that no, I'm not going to be doing as much next year."
