Today Is The Day! The JPQ Heads Into the Studio to Record Our Nick Drake Tribute!

After years of planning and preparation, today is the day the Jason Parker Quartet heads into the studio to record our new CD, “Five Leaves Left: A Tribute to Nick Drake”! I am so excited to spend the next three days making beautiful music with my dear friends Josh Rawlings, Evan Flory-Barnes, D’Vonne Lewis, Cynthia Mullis and Michele Khazak. It’s been an honor and a real treat to create our own spin on this timeless music with these fantastic musicians and human beings and I can’t wait to see (hear) what comes out of these sessions. I have no doubt that this will be our best record to date.

We are recording at Jack Straw in Seattle with the fantastic engineer Doug Haire. We’ve all worked with Doug before (he’s the guy who hosts Sonarchy Radio, on which the JPQ performed earlier this year) and I think we’ll be very comfortable in the studio. Big thanks to the folks at Jack Straw for awarding me an Artist Assistance Program Grant to help defray the costs of the recording. I really appreciate their faith in me and the project.

I also must give HUGE thanks to the 148 generous folks who supported our Kicstarter campaign. It is through their good graces that we will be able to make the best record possible. They have also put their faith in us, and we will honor that by bringing everything we’ve got to the session. They will be the first to hear the music we record, hopefully sometime in January.

I’ll be bringing my staff photographer and my trusty Kodak Zi8 video camera with me, so expect frequent updates from the studio.

Speaking of video, here’s a montage of our very first performance of these tunes back in August at Lucid Jazz Lounge: