Don Ross & Brooke Miller

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Canadian master guitarist Don Ross has been coming to The Rogue for over 22 years now, and each show is a new and rip-roaring adventure into his amazing world of 6 and sometimes 7 strings! his guitar wizardry has earned him two US National Finger-style Guitar Championships and his CDs and instructional DVDs are best-sellers around the world. But there's a lot more to Don than his stunning guitar work: he is a prolific composer of intricate - and sometimes blisteringly hot tunes in the style he christened "heavy wood," and he is also a fine singer, equally at home on his own compositions or on covers of songs by the likes of Leo Kottke and Bruce Cockburn. he has released over a dozen solo albums as well as collaborative CDs with Andy McKee, Calum Graham and Men of Steel (Beppe Gambetta, Dan Crary, Tony McManus and Don). His latest CD, PS 15, came out on Candyrat Records in 2014.

A Rogue Folk Club favorite and a true innovator of guitar composition and technique returns for his yearly visit this October. Don Ross has emerged as one of the most respected musicians in Canada and one of the top guitarists in the world. In September 1996, he managed to do what no other player has done: win the prestigious U.S. National Fingerstyle Guitar Championship for the second time (he first won in 1988). The competition, held yearly in Winfield, Kansas, cannot be won only with immaculate technique, but the player's music must also display a high degree of emotion and intensity - hallmarks of Don's style.

The son of a Scottish immigrant father and a Mi'kmaq aboriginal mother, Don was born in Montreal in 1960 into a musical family. He first started experimenting with the solo possibilities of the acoustic guitar at the age of eight. By age ten he was playing in alternate tunings and exploring "fingerstyle" technique, a right hand discipline similar to classical guitar playing. Preferring to write original music and develop a personal style, Don's self-taught journey on the instrument has encouraged him to follow his musical intuition. The result is an unclassifiable musical style that borrows from jazz, folk, rock and classical music. Don usually pigeonholes his music as "Heavy Wood"!

Don is touring once again with his wife Brooke Miller, herself a lethal combination of great songwriting, excellent guitar skills and a beautiful voice. She grew up with parents who were eclectic artists and musicians and music simply "soaked," as Brooke describes it, "into my pores." "I grew up with a lot of kitchen ceilidhs," she says, "kitchen parties — essentially just lots of food, wine and music that would go 'til six in the morning playing."

In third grade, she started to play the guitar and soon after, her parents bought her first electric guitar, drum machine and little 4 track Tascam recorder, on which she would create her own recordings. With two boys, she formed a trio called Bleek that soon owed more to punk, and by 12, was touring the Maritimes, opening for bands like Sloan and Modest Mouse. But a musician of Brooke's gifts and range soon outgrew the three chord confines of punk and began exploring more sophisticated and challenging techniques and genres — from the intricacies of finger-picking to the more colorful palette of jazz. She also began to take her own voice seriously, rather than, in her words, "scream my head off."

In 2007, Brooke released her first album You Can See Everything and went on to win the 5th annual Colleen Peterson Songwriting Award for her song Two Soldiers. 2011 saw the launch of a new self-titled CD/LP which finds her playing both electric and acoustic guitars. The recording is distributed by Universal Music Group. She also recorded a guitar-and-voice solo acoustic album in 2011 for the German label Stockfisch records in 2011, entitled Familar. She performs regularly across Canada, the United States, Japan and Germany.

So come down and get familiar with Brooke and Don, back at The Rogue at St, James Hall (Heavy wood in a heavy wooden hall!)