In the spring of 1991 I was in New Orleans for the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival (“JazzFest”) with my sweetie Priscilla. I had heard of a new cool night spot that was a bowling alley – Mid-City Lanes, also known as the Rock ‘n’ Bowl. So, on a weeknight when the JazzFest was not on, we decided to give it a shot. We went up the stairs and found about 10 people bowling and another 10 listening to a red hot rockin’ boogie-woogie trio led by Carl Sonny Leyland, a British transplant who was living in New Orleans trying to make a living slugging it out in Crescent City clubs – from Bourbon Street to Mandeville across Lake Pontchartrain. Priscilla and I had a ball jitterbugging to Carl’s trio. Afterwards I struck up a conversation with him and, in addition to catching up with him every time I came to JazzFest in the next decade, we discussed various business connections, a couple of which clicked. See “The Best of Ripsaw Records, Volume 4.” More recently, he and I have caught up with each other a couple of times at the Viva Las Vegas Rockabilly Festival, where he often backs up Ripsaw’s Martí Brom.
Adept at most any piano-based style of roots music from boogie-woogie to rockabilly to ragtime to barrelhouse blues, Carl now lives in California and plays mostly up and down the West Coast.
Find out more about Carl at www.carlsonnyleyland.com
“Hot Rhythm, Blue Love” – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9GzjaRDJPAU
