Meet Our Artists

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Rick Masters grew up in Summertown, Tenn., on a hippie commune founded by “acid guru,” Steven Gaskin, a friend of the Grateful Dead in 1960’s San Francisco.  The Farm was an experiment in communal living and communal ownership with minimal resources and a lot of music.  With limited electricity and no radio and television, every night was a musical jam fest around the fire with open-air rock concerts on weekends.  Rick got his requisite 10,000 hours of mastery time on guitar and vocals before he turned fifteen.  He also learned how to frame a house, rebuild an engine, run a tractor and laser-level a bean field.

Despite vows of poverty the commune members pooled resources and founded Plenty, a rapid-response charity that built and staffed an ambulance in New York City’s underserved Bronx; brought emergency solar power and soy farming to post-earthquake Guatemala and Belize; and sent rescue teams around the world wherever and whenever they were needed.  Rick joined every project he could.

He got his emergency medical training, passion for social justice and disdain for hypocrisy while working to help the sick and suffering in the poorest villages or richest city in the world.  Rick left the commune many years ago, but he never outgrew the core ethics: work hard, live simply and speak the truth…no matter the cost

Kaya Chevalier left Haiti at age 4 and immigrated emigrated to New York with her parents.  Her mother was a professor of English at the American University of the Caribbean, and her Swiss father is a doctor with Doctors Without Borders who came to Haiti for a medical mission, found love and never went back to Europe.  

From age five, Kaya studied piano, violin, ballet and Taekwando.  She speaks fluent English, French and Spanish, but loves the emotional impact of Jamaican and Garifuna accents.  She wants to write a novel someday, but likes the magic of songwriting for now. “In just a few words you can tell a whole story because the music sets the emotional tone and flow in ways that might take thousands of words to build,” she says. "Melody and rhythm can trigger more intimacy and character connection in a single measure than a whole chapter of prose.  I also want to understand people more deeply and intellectually before I try to write about them. I feel people so strongly in my heart and gut, I could tell their stories in a dance or song.  But to give their stories depth and meaning just with words…I’m not ready, yet."

Kaya plays bass and backup vocals in activist/singer, Rick Masters’ band.  “Rick is such a crazy visionary,” she says.  “And I love his original songs.  They’re so passionate about people’s suffering.  He looks all tough and dangerous, but inside he’s this big softie.  Then again, sometimes he goes out to the Sierra and climbs big cliffs without ropes.  So, maybe he’s not so soft.”

Kaya studies music and literature at NYU, but takes a lot of science classes, too.  “My dad would probably cry with pride if I went to medical school,” she says.  “But I’m not sure I’m ready to make a commitment like that.”

Jim Colter grew up in the Carson Valley of western Nevada.  In the 1800's, his family ran the Wells Fargo and Pony Express station at the foot of the Sierra Nevada and ran cattle for the MK brand.  He started playing guitar and writing music at age twelve when he first heard the old Marty Robbins song "Big Iron" and decided he wanted tell stories like that.  "Rock and rap were everywhere, growing up," he recalls.  "But old style country and western speaks to my heart.  The melodies and stories of real people living simply and close to the land...that's what I like." 

Living close to the big mountains of the West, he learned how to climb, ski, hunt and fish.  "The mountains can make you strong, fill you with beauty, or tear you to pieces," he says.  "However it goes, you want to keep your head on straight to take it all in."