A Few Anecdotes and a Preview of What’s to Come

Thursday, July 23rd’s concert with the Geoffrey Keezer/Peter Sprague Quartet is, to put it bluntly, going to be awesome.  Since the Athenaeum jazz page already goes into detail about the two artists’ impressive careers, I’ll try and keep myself from replicating their summary.  Instead, I’m going to tell a couple stories about how I’ve encountered these musicians, in the hopes that they’ll explain why I’m so excited about this concert.

Until recently, Peter Sprague seemed to me like a mysterious, even vaguely mythical, figure.  All of my schoolmates who had gone to UCSD Jazz camp marveled at his disarming amiability and his zen outlook (not to mention his furious guitar chops!).  These were the only things I knew about the man up until this May, when my school’s jazz band went up to Spragueland, his North County recording studio, to record several songs.  After about an hour in the studio, I realized that the little I knew about him was dead on: Sprague was patient, friendly, and a fantastic player.  Every once in a while, when there was a lull in the recording, he would take a guitar off the wall and casually start playing. Whenever this happened, everyone in the room would go quiet in awe and exchange astounded looks.

Geoffrey Keezer, too, was the stuff of legend before I heard him play last week at UCSD jazz camp.  His concert with – you guessed it – Peter Sprague was excellent.  The two interacted beautifully and explored their own instruments – from Keezer came some imaginative inside-the-piano (yes, inside) techniques, and from Sprague came a psychedelic, sitar-inspired guitar tone.  Their set culminated in a rendition of Eddie Harris’s “Freedom Jazz Dance” that tore the house down.

I know very little about the other two members of the Sprague/Keezer quartet (though I’m sure that I should know more).  I’m aware that Duncan Moore, the drummer and a prominent member of San Diego jazz culture in his own right, was at one point a protégé of the Bishop’s Jazz program’s very own director, Will “The Thrill” Parsons, which is certainly a plus.

That said, the fact that this rhythm section is playing with Keezer and Sprague is enough to fully convince me of their talent and aptitude.  I’m confident that this concert will be absolutely amazing, just as everything else I’ve heard these artists do has been.

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