Today was a long but fun day! I’m going to start a new series on YouTube. I haven’t decided if I’m going to call it “Live from Deke’s House” or “Deke’s House of Music” or what, but I’m going to be releasing a new song every week or two with video and high-fidelity audio recorded live at my studio, collaborating with some of the amazing musicians that I have been lucky enough to cross paths with!
I’ve been an admirer of Natalie Hanna Mendoza for many years now. She’s an excellent jazz singer here in Los Angeles. She’s really great, check her out! I suggested to her that we do a couple of duets, one jazz number and one honky-tonk country song.
She liked the idea, so today we convened at the house with a bunch of the best musicians in Los Angeles: Natalie’s boyfriend Gareth Price on Drums, Carl Sonny Leyland on piano, Jonathan Stout on guitar, Sam Rocha on bass, as well as DJ Bonebrake from the band X playing vibes on the jazz number and Dave “DB” Berzansky on pedal steel guitar for the country number.
Spike Marble from the Breezeway Hour/Hula Girls shot the video, Zander from the Centuries/Whippersnappers manned the recording studio, and we got some really good-looking footage and great-sounding recording that I can’t wait to share with you!
I’m excited about starting this new project, lots of exciting opportunities ahead! I’ll be posting the videos on YouTube, and making the audio recordings available on Spotify, Amazon, and Apple Music. I hope that you folks out there will enjoy this and all the videos to follow. Stay tuned: I hope to post the first video in about a month (I’m not posting any audio from what we shot today because I want it to be a big surprise!). And if any of you have a great suggestion for a title for the new video series, post your comments here!
See more photos at Deke’s original Facebook post!
