D ear Friends of Sun,
It exists these days but you gotta head east. To Palm Springs to be exact. That’s where Stef, Ruby and I went last weekend and we had a great time. It turns out our very own Digital Brian’s son Jacob of Apple fame got married and they had a cool two day celebration of the good life of marriage and the warmth of the sun. Swimming pools, a little hiking, checking out the broken down surf wave pool enterprise, tons of naps —sleeping until you get tired of sleeping. A truly good time and a nice balance device for the big gig schedule that we’ve just been through.
I even took the beach guitar and wrote a little ditty that sometime soon we might play…
We’re starting up the gig machinery once again and it’ll be a Friday night hang at Ki’s Restaurant in Cardiff on 5/17 at 7pm. The trio rides again! Look below for the details…
A new vid of ours just bounced off of YouTube and it’s called “Watercolors.”
It’s one of Pat Metheny’s classic tunes outfitted with a sweet melodic line and some good blowing changes. We’d of course heard the song before but It was a new one for us to learn.
This performance first appeared on our Episode 27 Live(ish) From SpragueLand livestream called Peter Sprague Plays Pat Metheny — Watercolors. Me and the band were gearing up for an actual live gig with Pat in Newport Beach. We took his set list, rehearsed for a few days and then did this livestream show, all in hopes of doing well with Pat himself. The good news is the gig went great and everyone was happy to be in orbit with one of the true masters of jazz.
Pat’s got it going on!
Here’s the band:
Peter Sprague — guitar
John Opferkuch — piano
Mack Leighton — electric bass
Duncan Moore — drums
On the “Watercolors” video is our very own John Opferkuch on the piano playing up a storm. I call him Sri Shrednoy because he shreds plus it’s a running inside reference to John McLaughlin’s guru Sri Chinmoy. Hah!
It turns out that in this month’s San Diego Troubadour (a cool newspaper about the SD music scene) they’ve included an extensive story on John and his early roots of learning to play jazz. It’s super worth the read and I learned some details about John that despite the many years we’ve been playing together, I’d never known. He’s an amazing muso and a clever wordsmith. I like this phrase from the interview:
“Early on, I became very smitten, a white high school kid in the suburbs, with Chick Corea and the high-gloss fusion of Weather Report.”
Dig the high gloss fusion!
Here’s the article in it’s entirety.
And while we’re talking about John, also just released this month is a new recording by saxophonist David Borgo called “Persistence.” John’s playing piano, me on guitar, Tommy Babin on bass, Richard Sellers on drums, and of course David on sax. The whole troupe came over to SpragueLand a few months back and for a couple days we documented David’s original compositions. Beautiful music and a nice range of jazz styles. David can really play and the good news is the recording is out and about in the streaming universe along with some good single song videos of how it all went down.
Check out the music here:
Bandcamp
YouTube
Alright good folks and that’s the story for now over here in the sphere of overcast skies and the good life of Leucadia.
see ya’ soon, Peter