Friends, it’s been a good time with a balance between live music, studio music, composing, a little ocean time and a bunch of classic family hangs out to Rubio’s. I think summer is here although you might get confused if you’re spending time on the coast. Grey sky meets grey ocean horizon meets grey car driving on a grey road. But fortunately said grey car is driving to the airport on Sunday and the big grey plane is busting above the grey clouds to enter a vivid world of BLUE. The blue ride will last for some hours and will eventually transport its riders to the magic island of Kauai. It’s here that color comes alive and summer most likely will begin. Stoke!

Last week my friend Yosuke visited me at my studio and we had a cool little jam that got caught on YouTube. Go here if you want to check it out. He’s a wonderful soul and a great player. I hope to hook up with him again here in SD or maybe in Japan.

Yesterday Tripp, Leonard and I tightened up the music that we’re going to play in Kauai for the jazz festival next week. Tripp’s now reading his music off of the iPad and I’m so happy about this. The pre-iPad Tripp situation was about a big huge pile of sheet music that had very little organization to it and luck was all you had going for you to hunt down a song that we hadn’t played in a while. Now it’s happily in alphabetical order and every tune that we’ve ever played is waiting patiently to be called into action. We now take requests! Actually we don’t although we’ve corralled what we think is a cool selection of favorites for the Kauai show.

And to launch out of San Diego in style, we’ve got a special house concert planned for this week with our trio playing the Kauai show program. If you’ve never been to a house concert you ought to give it a try. It’s a chance to hear music in a friendly and intimate setting with some cool people and some dessert treats during intermission. We’re playing at John and Kim’s house in Cardiff and they have a big living room with a stage built in with great acoustics. Opening up the concert will be John playing one of his unique arrangements on guitar, followed by the young and talented Nina Francis on guitar and vocals. Next up, we’ll take the stage and crank up the samba factor mixed in with Bob Marley and Stevie Wonder. Then an intermission with the ten million expressions of sugar loving arranged by Vickie and Christie, followed by another set of music complete with an all out jam at the end. If this sounds like it’d work within your world, look below for the details and the link to buy your tickets online. We’d love to have you there!