Peter Sprague Quartet LIVE!

Amazing! Our first public gig and it’s at our favorite live music spot – The Encinitas Library.

The band is:
Peter Sprague — guitar
John Opferkuch — piano
Gunnar Biggs — bass
Duncan Moore — drums

Peter Sprague Plays Ocean Song, Earth Song

This is a story about ripping off pristine Bach chord progressions and showcasing the end result in a hippy bookstore in downtown Del Mar circa the late 1970’s.

My gateway into the vast world of Bach was Jethro Tull’s Ian Anderson balancing on one leg, playing overblown flute to his killer version of J.S. Bach’s “Bouree.” It was rocking and that was enough to inspire me to search out the sheet music and learn the piece for solo guitar. After the first phrase repeats the tune shifts into what might be called a bridge and it’s there that the chord movement caught my ear. It’s pure Bach-ian magic with all of the best math and inspiration rolled into one and wouldn’t this work as a samba, I thought? Luckily chord progressions aren’t copyrightable and so I took the magic, integrated it with my Brazilian tune and presented new to the world “Ocean Song, Earth Song.”

That took place back in the late 70’s and the new composition had it’s world premier at a concert held at The Ocean Song Gallery on the corner of Coast Highway 101 and 15th Street in Del Mar. A wonderful Argentinian woman named Virginia Igonda ran the place and right next door, connected by a walk through, was a fantastic book store called The Earth Song, run by Jim Meadows. These folks were high quality humans who embraced the arts and thought nothing of morphing their stores, filled to the brim with stuff, into a Sunday night concert hall. I couldn’t believe the transformation! All of the books and art items that had to be relocated for the night and then the space opened up for musos and audience members to celebrate the special world of live music. 

A lot of magic went down at those concerts and it was only fitting to name the new Brazilian Bach mashup after Virginia and Jim. I remember the piece going over well with the audience but I’ll bet you anything that they didn’t know they we’re experiencing pirated Bach chord progressions in the flesh.

Dangerous music!

For this edition of Live(ish) at SpragueLand we’re keying in on songs of the ocean and songs of the earth. Luckily that pretty much includes everything except for maybe OUTER SPACE.  Sorry, we won’t be playing David Bowie’s “Life on Mars” on this episode but we will play the previously talked about “Ocean Song, Earth Song” plus the firmly grounded in the earth composition “Norwegian Wood” by our favorites, The Beatles.

A guaranteed good time for all!

See you in the ocean!

best, Peter