If you’ve been to one of my shows, you’ve heard Fred Bement go to town on the harmonica. The guy can play! Well Fred recently connected me with a friend of his who was interested in collaborating. His name is Jeff Purchon. He’s the nicest guy and is an incredibly talented guitar player with some heavy duty experience under his belt. Here’s a little blurb from his resume…

Jeff moved to London to become professional guitarist at age 21. He toured with Noel Redding (ex Jimi Hendrix), Clive Bunker (Jethro Tull) and in his career has jammed / gigged with Robert Palmer, Ginger Baker, Buddy Miles, Steve Holly (Wings) and many others.

Jeff has recorded in major studios including Abbey Road, Sun Studios (London), De Lane Lea, Roundhouse, Trident, Air London etc. In the 80’s in the US he founded and toured with Memphis Train, a Boston-based blues band playing at the Crossroads music festival in Nashville, House of Blues and other prestigious gigs.

These days Jeff still jams in three continents with various bands depending where he is. At the last Austin NAMM show in 2007, Jeff played with Buddy Miles and Vernon Reid of Living Color.

Pretty impressive.

This past Thursday night I joined Jeff and four guys that he pulled together-Ron Pastore on bass, Glenn Watkins on keys, Stanley Swan on drums, and another guy (name escapes me) on the organ-and over an hour we worked on four songs. We headed over to the Acton Jazz Cafe’s blues jam and rocked the house.

One of the guys recorded a few of the songs and sent them around today. While the mix isn’t great (and I was struggling to hear myself in the monitor), you can get a good sense of how we sounded.

Here’s Love Me Like a Man written by Chris Smither…

I should have more recordings to share (from the practice soon). I will post them here as well.

I hope to do something with these guys again at some point and will let you know when I do!

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 2nd, 2008 at 1:22 pm and is filed under live band, music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.