Dear Friends, over the weekend I blasted up to Portland to play a show with the flute insanity also known as Steve Kujala. Wicked arcing melodic masterpieces contrasted with chill whistle tones. Then the guy works the change in his pockets for a percussion shaker. Thank the good lord for quarters and pennies! I knew that pennies entire reason for existence hasn’t gone obsolete. Steve is one of my all time favorites and even though it was just the two of us hitting for two sets the range in color in texture kept coming creative and free. This dude is plugged into the grid for sure...

After the show we got mobbed by the latest version of the Flute Paparazzi. It turns out these young flute players also carry cell phones with cameras built in and lucking I got a photo of them getting ready to shoot a photo of me. Here is their flow chart—listen to old wild jazz guys play concert, go up afterwards and shoot photos of said old jazz guys, pose for a group photo looking cool and collected, go home and practice flute, next week play as featured soloist with the New York Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall, (no big deal, this is the third time this year that they’ve played that venue) and after show go to hotel room and have an ice cream cone.

You gotta love the new crop coming up…

And for this week it’ll be a weekend of getting back into the Leonard flow. It turns out he was buckled into a theatre gig for the last month and now he’s free again to bolt into our jazz explorations. We’ll play the Del Dios hit and then a new venue for us in South Park called The Grove. We’re covering the physical extremes of San Diego this weekend and I hope we get to see you. Check below for the fine print...

All good, Peter