Guitarist Nina Gerber steps into the spotlight with Sebastopol show

Guitarist Nina Gerber has made a career out of backing up other musicians. But she got so good at it that the spotlight found her anyway.

“I don’t write lyrics, and I don’t sing. That’s not my thing,” Gerber said. “I’m working on being a really good guitarist. I wanted to be good at one thing instead of mediocre at a bunch of things.”

Gerber was one of four artists chosen in June to receive a $25,000 grant from Whippoorwill Arts of San Rafael, a nonprofit that has supported Bay Area roots musicians since 2018.

“Nina Gerber is one of a kind … a ‘musician’s musician’ who, with her two hands, two ears and imaginative brain, created a style suited specifically to accompanying singer songwriter soloists,” wrote Jim Nunally, Whippoorwill Arts co-founder and board member. “Nina is an accompanist, in the fullest measure.”

Appearing in Sebastopol later this month with her longtime collaborator, singer Chris Webster, Gerber also plans to put out a new solo album.

“With the grant, I need to do a project, so I am going to do another solo CD,” she said. “I have three solo albums under my name, but it seems strange to call them solo when you’ve got a million people working on them.”

For the new recording, Gerber intends to include songs from musicians she has worked with the past, including Nanci Griffith, who died last year, and the late Sonoma County singer-songwriter Kate Wolf, namesake of the local music festival that ended in June after a 25-year run.

“The theme is to honor my friends who have passed away,” Gerber said.

Gerber, 62, talked at ease in her family home in rural west Sonoma County where she now lives with Maggie, her adopted rescue dog from Mexico, who sometimes joins her onstage.

The guitarist, acknowledged by other professional musicians as a master (singer Maria Muldaur once called Gerber “the epitome of a perfect musician”), remembers exactly when her own career as a musician really began.

“I heard Kate Wolf when I was 15 at the Laguna pizza parlor in Sebastopol. That’s when I knew I wanted to be a guitarist,” she recalled.

“I started taking music lessons from her husband at the time, Don Coffin,” Gerber said. “I would follow them to all their gigs, whenever my parents would left me drive. I knew her material, so I would sit in when Don couldn’t make it.”

Gerber went on to play consistently with Wolf, gaining national stature as her accompanist, from 1979 until Wolf died in 1986 from leukemia at age 44. Gerber played on four of Wolf’s albums. They also performed together on the public TV series “Austin City Limits” together in 1985, a few months before Wolf’s diagnosis.

“I was 18 years younger, but she was my best friend, and she took over the maternal role when we went out the road,” Gerber said.

Seen by the world as the team, the two did not always get along.

“We’d fire each other, but then we always got back together,” Gerber said. “She fired me more than I fired her. One of the times Kate fired me, she said, ‘You’re more than just music.’”

Over the years, Gerber has come to embrace the wisdom in that remark.

“When I started, I was so persistent about playing music. That’s all I wanted. I’ve gotten older and matured. I would hope I’m a better musician, and a better person,” she said.

Gerber later teamed up with Webster, playing what they call “sweet and funky bluesy folk.” Together, they eventually recorded their “Apple Blossom Lane” album, released in 2013.

“It took us awhile to get around to that album. We’ve been saying for over 30 years that we’ve worked together for 30 years,” Gerber quipped.

The duo will perform Sept. 16 at the Sebastopol Community Cultural Center.

Gerber has collaborated with many other artists, mostly folk musicians.

“In order to understand the depth of her skill, you may have had to hear her on recordings by people like Kate Wolf or heard live performances with vocalists like Nanci Griffith, Tom Paxton, Chris Webster, Kathy Kallick, Laurie Lewis, Chris Williamson, Teresa Trull, Karla Bonoff, Holly Near, Eliza Gilkyson, Rosalie Sorrels, Lowell Levinger and many, many, many others,” Nunally of the Whippoorwill Arts board noted.

One of her best-known musical partners is singer-songwriter Bonoff, with whom Gerber has performed in Japan and elsewhere.

“I am on tour a lot with Karla Bonoff,” Gerber said. “We’ve been working together for about 19 years now. We met at the Kate Wolf Festival. I told her I loved her music and knew all the guitar parts.”

Santa Monica-based Bonoff, responding by email to a request for comment, had high praise for Gerber.

“Nina has this uncanny ability to weave an emotional tapestry throughout a song … never getting in the way of the song, but adding this incredible depth to it. Her playing somehow includes more than just the textures of a guitar. She seems to be many parts of the orchestra at once,” Bonoff said. “Sometimes, I am just amazed at what I hear coming from her side of the stage.”

Over a long career, Gerber has found, she has shed some of her initial shyness and become more confident and feels she has a deeper understanding of the her own values, which date to the beginning of her career.

“Back then, it was all about peace, love and sprouts,” she joked. “I would say I have come full circle. It is about peace and love and even sprouts. If you can’t have love, understanding and compassion, we’d all be even more screwed up than we already are.”

You can reach Staff Writer Dan Taylor at dan.taylor@pressdemocrat.com or 707-521-5243. On Twitter @danarts.