G reetings Solid Folks of Sound,
We traversed the harmony of Jobim last week and lived to tell the tale. It was at Park and Market and oh does that music speak to me. Beauteous melodies, hypnotic groove nation, lyrics steeped in poetic wisdom, all coming together to reveal the Brazilian soul of sound.
We can’t wait to play it again and the good news is that we’ve got a date lined up at Dizzy’s down the way. (April 27 to be exact.)
from left to right: Danny Green, Allison Adams Tucker, Peter Sprague, Mack Leighton, Tripp Sprague, Beth Ross Buckley, Duncan Moore. photo by Monique Feil
Coming up this week on Thursday night we’re broadcasting from Radio Free Leucadia (that’s YouTube for most) highlighting the vocals of Aubrey Johnson.
If you’ve been watching our livestream shows from the beginning of the pandemic you might remember on two occasions that we featured Aubrey as our remote guest. She phoned it in from her apartment in New York City and her performances on Lyle Mays’ “August” and Chick Corea’s “Samba LA” blew our minds. What a sound, what a vibe, total virtuosity at play!
We’re thrilled that she’s coming to the west coast, first to run the LA Marathon and second to make the trip down to Encinitas to join us in a Live(ish) From SpragueLand livestream show. We’ll be playing a brand new song of mine called “Playground of the Gods” along with a few Antonio’s Carlos Jobim gems, a Joni Mitchell masterpiece, a bebopper strangely called “I Can’t Make Much Sense Out of You,” a Beatles psychedelic-ized jazz exploration and more.
The band includes some of the best with:
Peter Sprague — guitar
Aubrey Johnson — vocals
Danny Green — piano
Mack Leighton — bass
Duncan Moore —drums
Here’s the link for the show.
I hope you can join in!
Next up live this week we’ve got the trio set to launch at Ki’s on Friday night. It’s always a fun evening starting out with an ocean view sunset moment, great food, great music, and being around some of the happy people of north county. Look below for the details.
We’re releasing a new video today featuring a performance of Joni Mitchell’s song “California” with Sinne Eeg on vocals.
Back in the thick of Covid we did some livestream shows at my recording studio and on many occasions we would get a guest artist living in some remote location to join in on the music. How it would work is I would send them a guitar backing track and they would record and video themselves playing with the track. They’d send their part back to me and then live on the broadcast me and the band would play to their part. With the video switching going on it gave the impression that our guest artist was playing with us live even though they did their track in Copenhagen a week before.
And this was the case with Sinne. We were doing a night of Joni Mitchell music and I had this idea that Sinne would sound great on Joni’s “California.” She too is a big Joni fan! I love the way this came out and it’s a fresh approach to one of the great songs of the world.
This performance first appeared on our Episode 15 Live(ish) From SpragueLand livestream called Peter Sprague Plays Joni Mitchell — Shadows and Light.
Here’s who was in the band:
Peter Sprague — guitar
Sinne Eeg — vocals
Tripp Sprague — flute
Barnaby Finch — piano
Mack Leighton — electric bass
Duncan Moore — drums
There it is friends and signing off for now, best, Peter