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Judi Jaeger and Bob Reid met by chance in 2015 at the California Coast Music Camp when, as Reid passed through the crowd during a group singalong of Beatles tunes, their voices locked in harmony. On Nov. 3, they will bring their unique talents to the Aromas Grange for an evening concert that will include award-winning singer/songwriters Alisa Fineman and Kimball Hurd.
“I was standing at the edge of the circle,” Jaeger said, recalling the music fest, “and I started to sing along. Bob was going around the outside singing stellar harmony parts with people. I sang this note, and from nowhere, this voice came up and met mine in this amazing resonance.”
Reid was a visiting instructor at the event, one of the thousands he has participated in since realizing at 12 that music could be a profession and not just an entertaining pastime.
“I went to the Berkeley Folk Festival,” he said. “In the hallway, I saw Pete Seeger playing a banjo, and as I watched him, I thought, ‘This guy is working. This is his office.’ Nobody told me about this. Nobody said, ‘You can do this for a living.’”
By 17, Reid was a traveling musician, playing in bars in small communities and making contacts by joining their softball teams.
“I hoped to give people a reason to want to know me,” he said. “So, all my friends were from either playing music or playing softball. I did that for quite a while before I wound up living in Big Sur.”
Reid produced albums for Rick Masten, played clubs in Santa Cruz with Mark Bradlyn and eventually became friends with Seeger, the acknowledged dean of 20th-century folk singers who had inspired him to become a musician.
“I became part of his secret extended family,” he said. “He had a beautiful boat, and we’d sail for a couple of weeks, doing little festivals along the way. Musicians and storytellers from all over the country would join this program because of Pete.”
Reid moved to San Juan Bautista in 2000 to help raise young horses for veterinarian and breeder Deborah Harrison. He was also a journalist for the weekly San Juan Star. In 2013, Reid became the first content director for BenitoLink, having been an active member of the Community for San Benito County Vision San Benito advisory committee and listening sessions resulting in the nonprofit news service.
When he met Jaeger two years later, she had been playing music for about five years. She had been spurred to write her first song following the death of her mother, who had suffered from dementia for 10 years.
“I ended up writing about my feelings,” she said. “I had decided that was going to be how I would express my grief. I went to sing my one song at an open mic. I had never dreamed of standing up on a stage and singing a song I had written.”
She attended the California Coast Music Camp for several years before meeting Reid, mostly to concentrate on songwriting. One night, she decided she had been cocooning with friends to avoid the crowd of people before joining a sing-along on her way back to her cabin for the night.
Standing beside Reid, they recognized the connection they made when they sang together, which was the start of their collaboration.
“He looked at me,” she said, “ and I looked at him. I said, ‘Did I do something wrong?’ And I was serious, but he looked at me and said, ‘No, that was beautiful.’”
Reid said that the duo’s harmonies are their “special sauce” and that not just any two voices sound good together.
“There’s probably something biological about it that I don’t understand,” Reid said. “Judy has a beautiful singing voice, and I love to find that voice of mine that fits it. And the result of our voices together is just amazing.”
Reid said they have a wide range of material drawn from their separate work and songs others have written.
“On any given night,” he said, “we have a wide assortment that we perform, but we probably have another 40 we didn’t play that night that were fighting to get on stage. You can only ask people to sit for so long, right?”
Judi Jaeger and Bob Reid will perform with Alisa Fineman and Kimball Hurd at the Aromas Grange, 361 Rose Ave., on Nov. 3 from 4:30 to 8:30 p.m. Tickets are available on the Grange website.
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