Top ‘O the Summer To You!
I’m promo-ing it up this afternoon and Chick Corea’s supplying the soundtrack. What a great blend of fusion, samba, harmonic wizardry, and mini moog solos from the 7th galaxy no less. Supreme music!
This livestream wave is taking up a fair amount of bandwidth in musicians minds lately — how to do it? Should I do it? Where to do it? Who to do it with?
Robert Bush, a music writer over at The Reader, documented my adventure in getting to where I am now presenting Live (ish) From SpragueLand. It’s a tale of cactus cuts and questionable upload speeds and it thankfully has a happy ending.
We’re coming into a week of multiple livestream hits complete with upgraded tech features and always dedicated musos. We’ve set out tackling some challenging tunes and to keep the sonic balance and the heart rate nice and steady we’re using silence and slowness as key contrast elements. I like the blendo factor of fast, loud, slow, and quiet and this can really work in the soundproof confines of SpragueLand.
Here’s what’s coming up:
Blurring the Edges — Songs From the Width of the World
Guitarists Peter Sprague and Fred Benedetti join up with saxophonist Tripp Sprague and bassist Mack Leighton to rekindle their musical collaboration called Blurring the Edges. The music combines elements of jazz, classical, flamenco, samba and the blues. They start improvising and that’s when the blurring begins.
The group recorded two CD’s back in the day (Blurring the Edges and Sombra) and won Best Jazz Group in the 1994 San Diego Music Awards.
Peter Sprague – guitar
Fred Benedetti – guitar
Tripp Sprague – sax, flute and percussion
Mack Leighton – bass
with special guest Steve Kujala on flute
Next I’m be hanging out with guitarist Romero Lubambo for a Saturday afternoon livestream show. Romero is from Brazil but now lives in NYC and he’s one of the supreme guitarists walking the planet. Nicest human too! He’ll play a song, I’ll play a song, we’ll hang out and talk, it should be fun. See you there!
Peter Sprague and Rebecca Jade — Day Tripper
We’re thrilled to be back together again and this week we’re playing a version of Day Tripper that takes a rollercoaster ride through the funk outback and then eventually circling home to the realm of jazz harmony nuts and bolts. It’s a ride you don’t want to miss!
The Merc in Temecula can’t present live shows now because of the covid reality but they’re carrying on sponsoring some live hits and with their request to us, of course we said “yay, we love to play!”
The band includes some of the best with Rebecca Jade on vocals, Tripp Sprague on sax and flute, Mack Leighton on bass, Duncan Moore on drums, and me on guitar.
Peter Sprague and Rebecca Jade were awarded the 2018 Best Jazz Album by the San Diego Music Awards for their stellar “Planet Cole Porter” release.
Other songs planned for this outing include modern reworking of Cole Porter classics, a new reading of CSN’s amazing “Guinevere.” a gentle Leonard Cohen moment, and some gutbucket blues added in for good measure. It’ll be a fun moment of music and we hope to see you there in the big algorithm of the sky.
thanks good people and see you soon, Peter