Kim Macari writes:

Between 20th – 29th July, I will be on the road with LOCUS – a band I co-lead with Leah Gough-Cooper – a wonderful saxophonist based in NYC and featuring Riley Stone-Lonergan (tenor), Sam Leak (piano), Jay Davis (drums) and Tom Wheatley (bass).

Leah and I met 10 years ago, playing in NYJOS and in Tommy Smith’s Youth Jazz Orchestra in our teens. Shortly after our time in those groups, Leah moved to the US to study at Berklee and New England Conservatory, while I stayed in the UK – first at St Andrews and then at Leeds College of Music. We’ve kept in touch and watched each others careers develop and now 10 years on, we’re excited to work together again.

The development and rehearsal process has been a little unconventional, due to the fact that the band is spread across the UK and US. Central to the idea behind LOCUS is to bring strong individual musicians together and work together to play creative, original music. We all have experience of different jazz scenes – NYC, Boston, London, Scotland, Ireland, the North of England. There’s a wealth of shared experience in the group – we all write, improvise, perform…And of course, we all came through the music conservatoire system. But for all our similarities, we’ve gone down six different paths and that makes for a very interesting musical result.

Tour Dates:

20th July – The Verdict, Brighton
23rd July – The Jazz Bar, Edinburgh Jazz Festival
24th July – The Lescar, Sheffield
26th July – Olivers, London
27th July – HEART, Leeds
29th July – Pavilion Teepee, Manchester Jazz Festival