Vintage

Sometimes you find some great jazz guitar recordings in unlikely places, or on albums under other musician's names. I'm not a huge fan of Barney Kessel's later recordings, but his 1950s work is excellent, including The Poll Winners, which is one of my favourites. Recently I've also been enjoying the first Julie London LP Julie Is Her Name which includes Barney Kessel on guitar.

As Julie London once said of her voice, "It's only a thimbleful of a voice, and I have to use it close to the microphone. But it is a kind of oversmoked voice, and it automatically sounds intimate" (Life Magazine, 1957). And this recording is certainly intimate both with London's voice and also the scaled down instrumentation -- with only guitar and bass backing her. Barney Kessel's playing is very tasteful, never flashy, always the perfect compliment to London's singing. And that's exactly his job here--to make Julie London sound as good as she can. And does she ever!

Last year we had the pleasure to perform at the Maple Ridge Jazz & Blues Festival. A fan of ours brought her video camera and provided some footage for us. Here's a video clip of "You'd Be So Nice to Come Home To" which you can find on MySpace Video and YouTube. More videos are coming...

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Huggy Bear Leonard added a video of The Lab Rats playing "Chicken Shack" at the Purple Crab. To those of you who aren't familiar with Leonard and the Lab Rats, this is not my swing band. It's a blues band I'm also a part of. You can also download some live MP3s of this band.

Sorry for the bad language from one of the audience members in the background. I think he's trying to imitate one of DeNiro's movie roles. Hey, it's a bar and it's a blues band.

It's not the swing band, but I thought I'd give you a taste of another band I've been playing in, Leonard and the Lab Rats. It's a blues band run by Andrew "Huggy Bear" Leonard on vocals, harmonica, and amplified ukulele (yes you read that correctly).

We played a gig at the Purple Crab the other night to a packed house. Here is a track I recorded that night:

Chicken Shack - Leonard and the Lab Rats
Live at the Purple Crab

Keep in mind this is a one-microphone recording to mini-disc so the mix is not exactly the best. But it's not bad considering.