Tingstad & Rumbel tune up for Christmas

Published 9:00 pm Thursday, December 7, 2006

Eric Tingstad and Nancy Rumbel create music specifically to allow people to shut the world out, said Janet Hansen.

“Their music is very moving in its own right and it’s a world apart from what you hear on the radio every day,” said Hansen, the duo’s publicist.

“I believe it allows the listener to find their own feelings and opinions about the music, almost like having a movie in your head. You develop your own images and it isn’t someone telling you or spoon-feeding you what the music means. It’s what it means to you.”

For more than 20 years, audiences have been making movies in their heads while listening to the songs of this Pacific Northwest-based pair. On Saturday, audiences can once again shut out the world and bask in the beauty of holiday music as Tingstad &Rumbel play favorites from their three holiday albums.

This concert at the Edmonds Center for the Arts will include the duo’s two previous holiday CDs, “The Gift” and “Star of Wonder,” along with selections from their latest holiday CD, “Comfort and Joy,” Hansen said.

“This show will be all holiday,” she said.

A show that is all holiday is indeed appropriate for these two, who launched their musical success with “The Gift,” Hansen said.

The two met at a concert in Oregon. Eventually, Rumbel moved to the Puget Sound area nearer to Tingstad, who lives on the Sammamish plateau. He called her because he was thinking of recording a Christmas album and asked her how she played Jingle Bells, Hansen said.

They went on to produce “The Gift,” which sold 11,000 units in eight weeks without commercial distribution, Hansen said.

Tingstad is a classically trained guitarist, Rumbel classically trained in oboe. Though the oboe and guitar might seem oddly paired, the serene melding of these two instruments was a sound people really liked, Hansen said.

Tingstad grew up in Seattle and attended Western Washington University. He was trained in the Segovian classic guitar tradition and said in his biography that he’s been widely influenced, from Led Zeppelin to sitar player Ravi Shankar.

Rumbel’s biography says that in addition to oboe, she plays English horn and is a virtuoso of the double ocarina, an oval-shaped, flute-like wind instrument.

The two have shaped their career around touring, and they perform 70 to 100 shows a year. They’ve been together and traveled for so long that their long-standing joke is: We’re married but not to each other, Hansen said.

The duo won the Grammy Award in 2003 for “Acoustic Garden.” A 1998 release entitled “American Acoustic” won Best Acoustic Album of the Year, Hansen said.

Eric Tingstad and Nancy Rumbel perform Saturday in Edmonds.