Frank Solivan

He was born in 1977 and grew up in a musical family in Modesto, California, where both his parents played and loved bluegrass; his grandmother on his father’s side played mandolin and fiddle, and his mother’s side included classical violinists and cellists. He wore out Bill Monroe and Flatt & Scruggs tapes as a boy, heard New Grass Revival at nine, and at West Coast festivals was taken with the Johnson Mountain Boys. As a youngster he won contests on fiddle and banjo, and he earned second chair cello in the California All-State Honor Orchestra.

In 1995, at eighteen, he moved to Alaska, where his mother was singing, and stayed. He played first chair violin in the University of Alaska Anchorage Sinfonia, won back-to-back fiddle contests at the Alaska State Fair, and in the late 1990s took up the mandolin, which became his main instrument; he also played in the band of his friend Ginger Boatwright. His first solo album, I Am a Rambler (2002), released as Frank Solivan II, had four songs that won categories in the Alaska Public Radio Network’s Song of the Year contest, and it included an instrumental called “Dirty Kitchen.”

Shortly after that record he auditioned for Country Current, the U.S. Navy Band’s country and bluegrass group based in Washington, D.C., and was taken on as its electric guitarist, also playing mandolin and fiddle in its bluegrass lineup. In five years with the Navy band he made a second solo album, Selfish Tears (2006), with his mother singing on one track, and formed Frank Solivan & Dirty Kitchen from the core of the musicians on that record: Mike Munford on banjo, John Miller on guitar and Stefan Custodi on bass, with Solivan on mandolin and fiddle. He left the Navy at the end of his enlistment in April 2009 to lead the band.

Dirty Kitchen’s first album, Frank Solivan & Dirty Kitchen, came out in 2010, and after signing with Compass the band released On the Edge (2013) and Cold Spell (2014); by then the band was Munford, Chris Luquette on guitar and Danny Booth on bass. In 2013 Munford was the IBMA’s Banjo Player of the Year and Luquette won a Momentum Award; in 2014 Solivan was nominated for Male Vocalist and Mandolin Player of the Year, the band won Instrumental Group of the Year, and Cold Spell was nominated for a Grammy. The band won Instrumental Group of the Year again in 2016, the year Solivan released Family, Friends & Heroes, with guests including Del McCoury, Sam Bush, Jerry Douglas, John Cowan and his cousin Megan McCormick. If You Can’t Stand the Heat (2019) brought a second Grammy nomination, and Hold On (Compass, 2022) included six songs written or co-written by Solivan, among them “Modesto,” a tribute to his home town co-written by McCormick. He has also toured with the Earls of Leicester when Tim O’Brien was unavailable.