The North Shore Music Association is pleased to present a fun, energetic, and breathtakingly ebullient performance to kick off the 2025 season. Rue & Sabien play Rue & Sabien will begin at 7:00 PM on January 11 at the Arrowhead Center for the Arts in Grand Marais.

Gary Rue is well known to regional audiences for his work with FAB 6, Nip and Tuck, and the Sensational Sleepers. But he has also enjoyed a 50-year career as a songwriter for national and international artists, including Prudence Johnson, Butch Thompson, Pat Donohue, Debbie Duncan, Honeydogs, Willie Murphy, and Leslie Ball.

Randy Sabien describes his sound as “Bob Wills meets Art Blakey meets the Allman Brothers.”  His repertoire is all over the map, ranging from Western swing tunes, to instrumental versions of Grateful Dead songs, to swinging Duke Ellington pieces. Sabien has toured the world, playing in different styles and with many greats of the music world. “Jazz Profiles” of NPR dubbed him “The past, present and future of jazz violin.”

A Rue/Sabien performance is an ad lib, rapid-fire happening, riddled with a cascade of personally-penned favorites and peppered with musical ideas (occasionally interrupted by an errant thought: they sometimes feel the need to explain the process). There will be duologues on inspiration, oblique social commentary, and comic highs and lows (when good things happen to bad people), all thoroughly plumbed from the musical depths of piano, guitar, violin, mandolin, and voices that soar, growl, and bubble within a sardonic Robin Williams/Noel Coward sense of humor. The duo is influenced by nearly anything and everything musical.

Tickets to the show are $20 general admission. They are for sale in advance at northshoremusicassociation.com and at the door starting at 6:00 pm on the night of the performance. The Arrowhead Center for the Arts is located at 51 W 5th Street, Grand Marais.