Metro Pulse/Gamut/Robinella & the CCstringband

On the verge of a national release, Robinella & the CCstringband continue to make beautiful music from contradictions

by Jack Neely

Monday night is the bluest night of the week, the night that everything closes early. Last Monday, downtown at 10 p.m. was especially forlorn, enduring a miserable, endless rain. The few establishments that were still open looked like they wished they were closed. Market Square was a muddy, dark mess. But from the northeast corner of the Square came lively music: strains of jazzy mandolin, gypsy fiddle, and a high-soprano country vocal. And visible through the construction fences, glowing like some waterfront dancehall, was the illuminated door of the crowded Preservation Pub, and through the door and the crowd of more than 100 youngish people, you see only one face, the face of a grinning young woman holding a guitar, surrounded by her band.

Robinella and the CCstringband are, as unlikely as it may seem, the hot band of 2003. With a national-release album, a string of high-profile opening-band gigs, and an unexpected appearance on network TV, the pop-swing-bluegrass quartet which is sometimes a trio, sometimes a quintet, is something of a phenomenon, hard to categorize—as evidenced by the fact that the group is a repeat winner of the Metro Pulse poll for best country or bluegrass band and runner-up for best jazz band. That distinction would seem strange to those who've never heard them play. They seem like a throwback to some other time and place, but you're damned if you can nail down exactly what time and place it was.

If you ask Robinella what kind of music they play, she may answer, "It is and it isn't." That kind. It is and it isn't country, it is and it isn't jazz. The statement's almost as true for four or five other artificial categories of music.

She's been known to describe her band as "a tomboy girl and four sissy guys." Two of the sissy guys are her husband, mandolinist Cruz Contreras, and brother-in-law, fiddle prodigy Billy Contreras. The third is bassist Taylor Coker. The fourth is guitarist Steve Kovalchek.

When they perform, Robinella's high, wistful, fragile-sounding voice winds and twists and drops like a bird above Cruz Contreras's dependable mandolin, as Billy Contreras's fiddle flies interlacing patterns behind. She smiles or, more often, grins. Cruz generally looks pretty happy, too. These are not people of constant sorrow. In fact, their music is just barely bluegrass. It's mainly the mandolin that fools you. Contreras often takes the bluegrass accessory on adventures that seem to echo Django Rheinhardt's gypsy guitar-jazz.

Robinella sings in a lilting untrained soprano that sounds, at first, more country, along the lines of Dolly Parton or Allison Krauss. Ask her about influences, though, and she'll laugh. "Cruz taught me how to play guitar," she says. Beyond that, her influences are mainly her parents. Jerry and Nell Tipton are president and vice president of Big Gulley records, which made their first local releases.

Robinella and Cruz Contreras live with them, in the house her dad built, the house she grew up in, on a cattle and horse farm on a green hill beside a cemetery in farm country that some people consider greater Greenback. It's in Blount County, but from downtown Maryville you have to drive through a corner of Loudon County to get there. "This is Maryville," she says. "But people in Maryville don't think of it as Maryville." She embraces contradictions without anxiety.

Most of the phone calls they get at the house aren't for the artists about to make their national debut on Columbia; they're hard-headed queries about real estate for Robinella's father, Jerry Tipton, the realtor and businessman. On this rainy Tuesday morning, he's out. Robinella and Cruz are recovering from the previous evening's show at Preservation Pub. She's cooking herbal tea in a saucepan and shelling pecans, passing them across the table.

In person, off the stage, she's elusive, trying for all the world to seem like an ordinary fun-loving 20-something. Her eyes close in a concealing grin, and she seems determined to convince you that she's not necessarily the same Robinella Contreras who wrote "Man Over," a haunting ballad about a suicidal alcoholic. Asked about the inspiration for that song, she says, "I was feeling pretty sad that day." That's all she says, and then she grins again.

In discussing their music, she often defers to her husband of five years, who often defers right back to her. ("You go ahead, I'm sorry." "No, you can do it better.")

It's an unusual story. Cruz Contreras, great-grandson of a Mexican blacksmith who shoed horses for the circus, lived in Michigan until he was 12, when his father, a Whirlpool employee, was transferred to Nashville. Cruz took piano lessons as a kid, an obligation in an artistic family, but it wasn't Cruz but his little brother Billy who showed early talent. Billy was just a preschooler when he saw Charlie Daniels on TV. Cruz thinks it was the "Devil Went Down To Georgia" video, which featured some pyrotechnic effects. Cruz recalls that Billy said, "Mom, I want a fiddle with sparks." The family resisted at first, but finally gave in. Billy picked it up quickly, and by age six, he was a fiddle prodigy. He impressed everyone, but his teacher said he needed someone to back him up. Billy's parents turned to the kid's easier-going big brother, and said, "Will you play guitar, if we buy you one?"

"I don't want to pass up anything free," Cruz says. Billy Contreras was getting to be a little bit of a celebrity in Nashville, and the Contreras family often found themselves rubbing shoulders with legends. Cruz remembers a party at the home of well-known songwriter and string-band showman John Hartford. "We were there because everybody was so enamored with Billy," he says. "He was so talented, I kind of rode on his coattails for years." Cruz had hardly picked up a guitar when Bill Monroe, playing mandolin, asked him to accompany him on "Jerusalem's Ridge." "I faked my way through it," Cruz recalls.

In Nashville, he says, "Music was everywhere. A normal job was to play music. It looked like fun, playing music and having parties." Cruz befriended Hartford, often accompanying the fiddler and mandolinist on guitar, admiring the older man's free-spirited mixture of styles—and his love of playing small, unpretentious venues.

As Billy continued to wow the Nashville pros with his fiddle, going on to play with jazz legend Lionel Hampton in festivals, the lesser-known Contreras came to UT in the mid-'90s to study jazz piano with Donald Brown. Cruz was also playing some banjo, but despite his exposure to Hartford and Monroe, he didn't pick up mandolin until he was 19, encouraged by Buddy Spicher of the Nashville String Band. It wasn't until he took a month-long gig playing electric piano for Ringling Brothers Barnum & Bailey Circus that he spent much time with a mandolin. To wind down during breaks in performances in Mexico City, he practiced.

Meanwhile, Robinella Contreras was an art major at UT, studying illustration. Her only singing experience had been in church, at the Union Grove Baptist in Big Gulley. She loved to sing, but never earned a spot in the William Blount High School Chorus. She met Cruz in '97. "The Music Building is right next to the Art and Architecture Building," she states of the inevitability. They started playing together. They remember playing Cruz's own country-mandolin arrangement of the Nina Simone classic, "Feelin' Good" at an open-mike night at McGhee's Irish Pub on Cumberland Ave.

They impressed their audiences, and themselves, and soon became the nucleus of a five-piece bluegrass band known as the Stringbeans that played mostly at free functions on UT's ag campus, at Maryville's Jazzberry General, and at WDVX's Camperfest. When their guitarist and singer, Jay Clark, moved to Nashville in '99, the now-married Contrerases reformed as Robinella and the C.C. String Band.

In an auspicious debut of what became the basic lineup, Billy joined them for a WDVX-sponsored show at the old WNOX auditorium at Whittle Springs organized by impresario Roger Harb. That evening, Billy squared off with a somewhat older fiddler, Bob Douglas, who was then nearly 100. Billy lived in Nashville before studying jazz at the University of Miami on a Fulbright scholarship. Though featured on the band's recordings, he had joined them for live shows only occasionally.

This time they took a different tack. When they opened as a trio (Robinella, Cruz, and bassist Taylor Coker) at the Bearden pub Union Jack's, "Everything changed right away," says Cruz. "We added swing songs right away. Ellington's 'In a Mellow Tone' was one of the first.

Cruz admits he and his little brother ganged up on Robinella, who was still singing in her country style. "You're not a jazz singer. Ella Fitzgerald, Nina Simone, Dinah Washington, they're jazz singers." Robinella dutifully listened to recordings of those ladies, but kept singing her way. "It didn't change her vocal style at all, that jazz. But it added to the repertoire." She picked up something somewhere. She may prefer country, but she has an innate understanding of the jazz style, using her voice like a bebop saxophone. ("I'm a big fan of old Hollywood movies," she says. Ah-ha, you think. But then she adds, "Like Memphis Belle. You know, with Harry Connick." That one was made in 1990.)

They soon got a gig singing on Sunday nights at Barley's, the Old City pizza-and-beer place. At the time, it was about the only place open downtown on Sunday nights, and they developed an impressive following, tricking the audience with bluegrass, jazz, an occasional movie tune or an old bossa nova piece from the '60s, played maybe for the first time ever with mandolin and fiddle. They put their own stamp on standards, ranging from a surprisingly sultry version of the George Jones classic, "White Lightnin,'" to an oddly heartbreaking rendition of "Flashdance: What a Feelin.'"

Some of their songs send you raking your memories, trying to remember who wrote it. Songs like "Blanket For My Soul" or "No Saint, No Prize" will send you to the credits, where you expect to see names like Mercer or Porter or Rodgers. But the name you see is Contreras. One of them is "Candy-Coated Valentine," which sounds for all the world like a 1930s Fats Waller hit. Robinella wrote it, not too long ago. "That's my I Love Cruz song," she says.

Cruz says Rheinhardt's distinctively jazzy guitar styles were a secret enthusiasm for many older professional musicians he knew in Nashville. "Old-timers there had a love for Django Rheinhardt," he says, even those who made their living as bluegrass and country musicians. He picked up a few tricks.

They carried on like that for the next couple of years. People would encourage them to publish a CD, and they did: two full-length releases, in 2000 and 2001, for local consumption. Each sold some thousands of copies. By the end of 2001, they were getting tired. "We'd done a lot of gigs," remembers Cruz. "We were making a living, but we were getting tired. Live gigs, night after night in the smoke." Robinella was worn out, and ill for a time, her father sometimes subbing for her. They decided to give it up for at least three months.

In the audience at what they thought might be their last show at Barley's, was Andrew Hyra, former Knoxvillian, brother of actress Meg Ryan, and half of the Atlanta-based folk-rock duo Billy Pilgrim. Hyra heard Robinella, and liked the band. He recommended them to New York music agent Jennifer Stark.

During their alleged sabbatical, they kept playing Wednesdays at Regas Bros. on Kingston Pike "just so we wouldn't lose it." Stark came to one of those shows, and went to work. Soon AC Entertainment was calling, spoiling their sabbatical. "We opened for Nickel Creek on a Monday, Earl Scruggs on a Friday, at the Tennessee Theatre," says Cruz. "That was a big week for us."

By March, they'd decided to give up on the pretense of taking a break altogether, and returned to Barley's. Word got out that a couple of representatives from Columbia, senior vice president Jeff Jones and A&R man Mitchell Cohen, were going to be in the audience. "It was the most packed we've seen it, and people listened. It was like everybody was there to help us."

They got a call the next morning. Columbia's scouts liked what they'd heard, and were especially impressed with Robinella's ability to carry a ballad. (Cohen was later quoted in an online publication raving about Robinella as "a jazz-pop-bluegrass-swing act...that pretty much knocks me out.") Ever since then, we've been preoccupied with that," says Cruz.

They signed a deal to make an album for national release. If it sells 50,000 copies, they'll make another.

Last fall, they went on a two-week tour opening for Texas country-rocker Robert Earl Keen. Though the Contrerases like Keen, they didn't always agree with his distinctive audiences. At Tipitina's in New Orleans, a rowdy Robert Earl crowd nearly chanted the openers off the stage.

They took it in stride as part of this weird business. Late last year, they went to Bearsville, the famous studio at Woodstock, N.Y., to cut their first national-release album for Columbia. The producer in charge was Russ Titelman, who has earned Grammies for his work with Eric Clapton and Steve Winwood. The band wasn't awed at meeting him, because they'd already known him. He was a fan who had attended their shows in Nashville.

It's titled Robinella and the CCstringband. The eponymous album bears exactly the same name as their first local release. "Columbia made it seem like it's not a big deal, because the first one's known only to local people," says Robinella. "I wanted to name it Tanasi, because it's Cherokee for Tennessee. They said, 'That doesn't make any sense.'"

In the band, the Contreras guys seem to demonstrate stronger jazz tendencies—which isn't surprising, since the brothers both studied jazz formally—while Robinella cleaves more toward country. At the moment, her preferences appear to be on the ascendant. The new record seems to lean about 15 degrees more country than their previous CDs. The covers include the 1947 Red Foley hit, "Tennessee Saturday Night"; "Marie Laveau," the voodoo ballad popularized by Bobby Bare (but co-written by Shel Silverstein); and the rural spiritual, "Hold To God's Unchanging Hand." Several of their originals are unapologetically country: "Dress Me Up, Dress Me Down" and "Morning Dove" sound like songs that could only have been composed on a sunny cabin porch.

"We're writing more country songs," she says. "I do most of the writing, and it's easier for me to write a simpler song."

But she does make time in the new record for a touching rendition of Duke Ellington's "In My Solitude." Somehow, the way they play it, it fits right in.

Early this year they embarked on a longer tour with Australian alternative-country singer Kasey Chambers. "It was a great experience," says Robinella. "We bought a bus, and converted it. Dad put a generator in it. And Dad drove, then Cruz. We played the Fillmore, House of Blues, large venues." They ran out of gas in Atlanta, encountered major snowstorms in the Midwest. "None of us had ever traveled," she says. "I like California. And Missoula, Montana."

They opened for Willie Nelson in Huntsville, Ala., and for Bob Dylan in a large nightclub show in Nashville. Though they didn't get to meet Dylan, and the impatient stage manager was brusque with them, they did get to meet Emmylou Harris, who said she liked their show.

In New York for a prominent show at Irving Plaza in late February, Kasey Chambers strained her vocal cords and, at the last minute, canceled. What seemed a major disappointment became an unexpected opportunity. There'd been another cancellation at the Conan O'Brien show, and they found themselves being whisked to NBC Studios. "They took us straight to the set and we did a sound check," says Cruz. An hour later, they were playing "Man Over" before a studio audience. "It was just a rush, over all," says Cruz, who sounds like he's still recovering from the experience. The studio audience loved them, and the following days brought enthusiastic calls and e-mails from around the country.

They haven't let it go to their heads. "For now, we're just sitting here, not spending money," admits Cruz. In most record deals, everybody besides the artist takes their money off the top.

"We took a pretty sure thing and just threw the dice out," says Cruz. No matter what, Cruz says, "I personally hope we'll get a second chance" to make another record. That's their ambition. That and building a studio on an 18-acre plot not far from the Tipton home in the region of Trigoria. (It's where Blount, Loudon, and Monroe Counties meet.)

Robinella isn't sure how to respond to her confident fans. "People say, 'You're going to be so famous, you're going to sell so many records.'" The fact is, they don't have any idea what will happen. "It's not that type of business."

They're playing the Red Light in Atlanta on the 16th, WDVX Camperfest in Kodak on the 17th, then throwing their official album-release show at Barley's on the 25th. Next month sounds a little nutty: they'll play the Bonaroo rock festival, open for Del McCoury at the Ryman in Nashville, and make up Kasey Chambers' canceled dates in New York and Massachusetts. Then, sometime later, they'll start touring.

In the meantime, they'll keep playing free shows on Monday nights at Preservation Pub for anyone who wanders in from the dark to hear.