The Lone Peak Sound Family

“Yeah a lot of the same names come up when you’re talking about Lone Peak Sound and I think that's because first of all Salt Lake City is a small city; I call it “Small Lake City” because of that: everyone seems to know everyone.  And so you look at the percentage of the general population who are jazz musicians and it's probably one percent of one percent of one percent, or something like that, so all the best jazz musicians know each other and we develop friendships over the course of years, you know. We’ve been playing together, that crew-- that Zanzibar crew, the Lone Peak Sound crew-- some of us have been playing together for almost twenty years now. So yeah, the same names keep popping up because they’re the best musicians around here.

“Kenji Aihara-- you know, I mean Kenji's on Flamingo, he's on The Number Ones record, he's on The Night We Called It A Day, he’s on Everything I Love, Angela [Bingham]’s record.  He's on the new record that I just recorded which will be called Dream with Caleb Curtis on alto sax and the Jazz Vespers Quartet. Yeah so, you know Lone Peak Sound is my own personal Blue Note records in a way. Sort of like my Salt Lake City version of Blue Note Records.  

“With Blue Note Records you had a group of musicians who played a lot. I mean, on how many records does Billy Higgins play drums? On how many records does Butch Warren play the bass? On how many records is Kenny Drew playing piano or Lee Morgan playing trumpet, or Joe Henderson playing tenor. You know, they were part of a family: we call it the Blue Note family; we’re called the Lone Peak Sound family: these are musicians that, you know, if you had a world-class musician rolling through Salt Lake looking to put a band together, these are the musicians he would hire.  

“So yeah, a lot of the same names keep popping up, and that’s actually kind of cool: if you follow the label and you are a fan of the music and you follow these records closely you learn about these different musicians and learn about their playing styles and and become well-acquainted with their voices on their instruments. And that's really what jazz is about: it’s about finding your voice and expressing that.  So people who follow the label are going to get well-acquainted with the Lone Peak Sound family.”