Photo courtesy of David Leach
Al Davis: Good morning, David. How are you, sir?
David Leach: I'm doing alright!
Al Davis: Good to see you, good to meet you for the first time. Tell us a little bit about yourself, David.
David Leach: Well, I'm a pianist-composer. I'm from Boston. Grew up in Rozi. Let’s see, my mom was the minister of the Hyde Park Presbyterian Church for about ten years. So I played a lot of music there. I'm a teacher, and…. I’ve got a seven-week-old right now.
Va Lynda Robinson: Oh wow, congratulations!
David Leach: And I'm excited about this show! This will be the first thing I'm doing since she was born.
Al Davis: So, you combine improvisational jazz and avant-garde together. That's interesting! Tell me a little bit more about that.
David Leach: I've always been drawn to so many different styles of music. My wife's a classical violinist and Irish fiddle player. Back in 2017, I'd injured myself, I couldn't play, and I wanted to be making music. My wife and I had never been able to really play music together, so I started writing music for us, which was kind of avant-garde/classical inspired. I wanted to be able to bring my improvisational stuff to it, I wanted to be able to bring her Irish fiddle playing to it, and that project ended up being called "Room to Spare," but it really influenced what I did on this record with this quartet.
Va Lynda Robinson: That's fantastic. Tell me about your band, David. I know you have some fabulous folks who are working with you. Tell me about them.
David Leach: I'm so lucky to be playing with these guys. You know, Lihi Haruvi on sax, Dor Herskovitz on drums, and the legend John Lockwood on bass. I feel just incredibly blessed to be working with them. This project kind of started with me and Dor in his basement a while back, playing some tunes that I'd been working on for a while. And then he brought Lihi and John on board. I've just learned so much from them. I remember the first time we had the whole band together, Lihi came in and we were we were playing "Drawing Monsters," and I remember we got to the improvisation section in the rehearsal and it just felt like flying. And I was like, "Oh, this is the band!"
Al Davis: So, what do we expect to hear tomorrow starting at 5:30?
David Leach: It's gonna be all my originals, off of the record [the ground that holds you as you fall forever]. I like to say I'm a jazz musician with a heavy metal habit. This is a tough world we live in right now, you know. So, I want my music to kind of be a way for people to encounter some of those things and work through it. And so, it's it's gonna be maybe a little bit of a louder show than you might expect in a library, gonna mix it up. I also have some ballads that I really like from the record that we're gonna play as well. So it’ll be a mix of things.
Va Lynda Robinson: And let's talk about your debut album, and the way you put it together.
David Leach: A lot of this music was, some of it was stuff that I started writing, gosh, ten years ago, after I finished college and moved back to Boston. Like I said, I was injured, I couldn't play, and I was composing. So, some of this was music that I'd resurrected, and kind of brought back to life. I just felt this spark with Lihi, you know, in terms of interacting. We went into the studio in April of 2024, and Lihi was five or six months pregnant, which is unbelievable. You listen to her playing on that record... the fact that she could do that at that stage was amazing.
Al Davis: Well, we're excited about you performing at the Boston Public Library tomorrow! We're looking forward to hearing you, man. It should be wonderful.
David Leach: Thank you, thank you.
Va Lynda Robinson: And once again, congratulations on the baby! We'll see you on the 11th!
