New! New! New!

So this is the little page where I tell you what’s been happening friend to friend, things I’m excited about and a brief answer to the familiar question busy travelers get all the time, “Where ya been?”

Late Fall 2023

I decided on the anniversary of DFSL — Document:Freedom:Spring (Live!) — to put it up on the streaming services. I thought it would be fun to revisit it and give more people access in their favorite apps. Bandcamp is still my preferred way of releasing, but I do want to reach as many people as possible, even with an intimate recording like this. So please “favorite” me on Apple Music and the links below will take you to the latest album on all your favorite services. (Or hit up my LinkTree at linktr.ee/jasonluckett)

Apple Music

Spotify

Bandcamp

Amazon Music

TIDAL

Also, I forgot to post this video from September from The Victory Theatre. It was a show about the play, A Raisin In The Sun. I wrote a song from Walter Lee’s perspective. You can watch it here on YouTube:

The song is better than the performance, but those are the breaks!

Fall 2023!

What the heck…?

I just jumped on because I’d heard there was an issue on the website (now fixed), so I wanted to check the menu links and realized that I hadn’t updated this page since the album came out! So much has happened. The main thing that I’ve been up to is hosting my residency at Lyd & Mo. You’ll see below here that I’d just gotten a new guitar and played there for the first time last fall, which cracks me up because it now feels like home after 8 months of First Fridays Jazz Night with Jason Luckett & Friends.

And if you’ve been following along, you know that I started 2023 with a Jazz Vespers at All Saints Church in Pasadena, performing Freedom Songs from the Civil Rights era along with my related compositions. I was joined by Russell Ferrante on piano, Edwin Livingston on bass, Reggie Quinerly on drums, and Nailah Porter on vocals.

This led to an invitation to reprise my arrangement of People Get Ready/One Love (performed at the vespers with Nailah) for the Easter Service there, with Russell Ferrante on Piano and Dorothy Coleman Pincus singing with me.

It hasn’t been all church, though. I got to croon for the Harry Nilsson Singalong again, taking on a standard from “A Touch of Schmilsson in the Night.”

But to bring it back First Fridays, really the greatest thing about it has been reconnecting with old friends and fans, while creating a community with the new people that have been joining us. In addition to the musicians that have played onstage, it’s been great to have musicians in the audience month after month. And it’s led to me recording more people in my studio in Hollywood, too, which I don’t I think I’d ever would have thought to be a by product of doing shows. But building community has become one of my greatest joys! And on my birthday this year in August, many of the performers who’d played came back and sang my music!

Here’s a little highlight from the July show, joined by David Sutton on bass, who’d played with me in a band back in the mid-90s, and also played on The Second Half of the Bet (Hope Again!).


Fall 2022!

The live album is live!

This took a while, but we’re finally here! “Document:Freedom:Spring (Live!)” is available now! I put it out on Friday, October 21, exclusively on Bandcamp. It’s from the show mentioned in the Summer re-cap, but I really tell the story in the “liner notes” on the album page on Bandcamp. I got a great assist from my friend, Raymond Moore, who mastered my edits and balanced it so that you really feel like you’re in the room with us. Here’s a song from the show:

Our Moment in the Sun – Live at Warner Grand Annex

My friend, Dee Madden, encouraged my return to Bandcamp, and I’m so excited about the platform that I put up my entire catalog. What’s cool about Bandcamp is that you can download hi-res audio files or any version for the same price, so the music will sound better than most streams. And supporters can pay what they want for an album above a minimum, with most of your money going straight to the artist. So, theoretically, you can write it, record it, upload it and get paid for it in a day. That might not mean much to you reading this, but to me, that’s freedom!

Speaking of Dee Madden, the songs I did for his project, “Anybody” and “Fool’s Cloak” are now out on Bandcamp, too.

I hope to be booking shows again soon, but just had to get this record out and take care of some life stuff before going back full force into gigging. And, I’m also starting to work on a new studio album, so gigs will come, but they will be rare for a while.

However, I did play a great show at a venue called, “Lyd & Mo’s” in Pasadena a few weeks back. I’d just gotten a new Epiphone “Inspired by Gibson” ES-335 a few days before and I was in awe of it! I don’t know why I never had a 335 before!


Summer 2021 – 2022

What the heck??…

Time flew!! The highlight of 2021 was the brief pre-Independence Day flash of normalcy where I got to present an evening of new songs and reimagined favorites at the Warner Grand Annex in San Pedro. It was my first time playing piano for a concert since high school! I led a songwriting workshop a couple weeks before as part of this special NEA sponsored Roots and Rambles series. Live album to come, I swear.

We know what happened next, mostly we all just went indoors. But I did play a few little shows here and there.

Then summer 2022 started off with a little gig on a yacht, which pumped up my yacht rock spirit!

But even more exciting was that I feel like the songwriting muse returned with a vengeance somewhere around spring. And that lined up really nicely with being asked to play the Idyllwild Songwriters Festival presented by Brett Perkins. The festival was the culminating event after a week-long retreat where songwriters from all over the west gathered to collaborate. I decided to join that, too, and I’m so glad that I did! I met a wonderful community of musicians.

A few weeks later the old gang got together for another Nilsson night, presented by Todd Lawrence.

And now the calendar is starting fill up a little with shows in Pasadena and Paso Robles.

And, I’m hitting the studio almost every day. Not sure when something’s coming, but it’s coming.

Somewhere along the way I also managed to contribute some noisy rock ‘n’ roll guitar tracks to Dee Madden’s upcoming releases.

Feeling pretty good!


Fall 2020

The gradual reopening…

One highlight was being asked by Susan Hayden to participate in her literary series, Library Girl, for Library Girl Presents: Wild is the Wind – Tribute to Nina Simone. It was an amazing collection of writers and artists doing pieces inspired by Ms. Simone. I decided to do an a cappella version of “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free,” a song I’ve always loved and have performed in a couple other contexts — in a Freedom Songs set with David Crittendon, and as part of an Emmett Till remembrance produced by Kevin Spicer at Highways.

https://www.facebook.com/557617716/videos/10157644774067717/

I’ve continued to score short films for All Saints Church in Pasadena. That’s been a really great experience.

The meditation for All Saints Day was shot by Alison Pill and the text from Sirach/Ecclesiasticus contained in “The Inclusive Bible: The First Egalitarian Translation” (https://bit.ly/32NMd6T), read by Len DeVane.

This was set for the Homecoming Service in the sanctuary, in which only the priests and readers were present. The piece was conceived and edited by Alison Pill and Shane McRae.

And this was a joy to do for the Blessing of the Animals. It’s read and filmed by Alison Pill. And I got to imagine that I was composing for PBS in the early 70s!

I’ve also gotten back into doing some Zoom shows for kids, but it’s nothing like it was before. However, kids can still throw that joy back to you even through a Zoom window!

Most exciting to me is that I feel like I’m writing some good songs. There’s nothing like a deadline to kick me into gear, as the short films have and the song I wrote for the “All’s Well That Ends Well” show. The great thing about getting in gear is that you keep driving. So I hope to keep that up and share some of them with you in time.


Summer 2020

Four months into “Safer-at-Home” during this pandemic and six weeks after George Floyd’s murder. 

The first few weeks were rough, then I started practicing and writing, joy returned. Then it got rougher. But then writing began with a new purpose. 

You can read about it more extensively in my friend, Pete Abraham’s interview:

https://medium.com/@peterabraham/life-during-lockdown-jason-luckett-8cd5b7f449d0

Writing about music started me going. It was originally on Facebook, but I’ve added the bits here in a section called Albums that Changed Me.”


Then, I was called to work with All Saints Church in Pasadena with an amazing group of creative people. I put “The Witness is in Our Breath” together using prayers selected and read by Steve & Clara Williams, audio from street protests, and Phoebe Boyd, a formerly enslaved woman, interviewed in 1934 (from where I got the title). Steve Williams put together this lyric video:


This led me to be asked to speak to the Racial Justice Ministry, for which I wrote the essay, First Born, Beige Son

https://medium.com/@Groovysoul/first-born-beige-son-6c8e4d513ea6

There may be a video of the event surfacing soon. 

Please stay safe and inspired. 


Autumn 2019

The past few months have been really gratifying. I’ve mostly been woodshedding, as they say, becoming a better musician. And, in the midst of that, I had an opportunity to score a film and see the release of an album I began three years ago. 

The film is about the caregivers to the people in a transitional living facility. The project is by a photographer turned filmmaker named Rebecca Truszkowski and it’s a subject dear to both of our hearts. Her grandmother, and my mother (not the same woman), both spent a good part of their lives caring for mentally ill homeless. What’s so beautiful about this film is that so many of the current caregivers had been clients at the facility before dedicating their work life to offering others a hand up. The music is clean acoustic guitar that tries to reflect the beauty of those who work so hard to provide a loving place from which to begin again for people who’ve been through some horribly difficult situations.

Mood Swings

The album is called “Mood Swings” and the artist is Larry Wolf, whom I’ve mentioned a few times on this site. He was one of the circle of actors Robert Downey Sr. used for his movies back when Iron Man was just another dog in the “Pound.” It’s mostly a jazz record, with a little bit of Leadbelly. I produced a much of it, played guitar and harmonica, and contributed some BVs. Because Larry is a good actor, he’s such a good musical storyteller. But, this isn’t an actor’s record, this is a seasoned vocalist, digging into the essence of songs you may have heard hundreds of times…or not. Larry also adds some of his own verses and commentary to evergreen standards. What’s gratifying to me is that the reviews have been so positive, with special mentions for the guitar playing in a group with veterans of Jazz artists I’ve admired for years. And if I can share an intimate thought, I did have a moment listening to the rough mixes where I heard myself and felt like I was playing like I’d like to hear someone playing. That may sound silly (and all self-criticism is still close to the surface!), but it’s a wonderful feeling to step into a world and feel like you can do just what you wanted to do within it. 

And if you haven’t heard it on KJAZZ in Los Angeles, the reviews link to it and you can find it here. 

Other things to emerge from the shed have been a couple of nice solo jazz guitar gigs and of course the great fun of singing Nilsson at the beginning of the summer. 

Autumn is my favorite season, so I’ll have more good stuff to share with you before too long, I hope!


Previously new… (Yeah, why not… from 2017)

  1. This is crazy…I thought I’d be updating this a little more often…but since I moved into the little studio I talk about below (which has gotten cooler and more functional over the past year), I was in La La Land, playing in a band with Ryan Gosling. As fun as it was to film, the coolest thing was seeing myself on the screen at the Cinerama Dome where I saw so many great musical films growing up, like The Sound of Music, Fantasia, Yellow Submarine and The Doors. Now I was up there in a ridiculously perfect 80s suit playing an A Flock of Seagulls song!
  2. I just did an episode of Scandal for ABC, again as a guitar player in the band. Now that was surreal, as I’m a total Shonda Rhimes geek. Why was I hanging out with these people who are usually contained on my TV screen? And how come they’re all so freaking nice?! I mean, the Prez, “Mellie Grant” was the perfect audience member as we played, the kind that gives you all that supportive love with her attention and smile…and we were miming! I had a blast! You’ll find me in the last season, Season 7, Episode 2!
    Jason on Scandal
    In front of Pope & Associates.
  3. And I’ve really gone Hollywood, now that I’m living a 10 minute walk up (barely) into the hills from the Capitol Records building on Hollywood and Vine. I can walk to my studio in 30 minutes or walk to the Hollywood Reservoir in 30 minutes. It’s all that’s amazing about Los Angeles, urban and peaceful.
  4. I’m still really excited about my studio. This is my second room since I started putting things together. My first was in Laurel Canyon, walking distance from home, but the noise overwhelmed the charm and I moved to a new place on the top floor of a building near Sunset and Highland. How can the heart of Hollywood be quieter and calmer than Laurel Canyon? Well, I was on Laurel Canyon Blvd on the ground floor… Oh, I didn’t mention that Jimi Hendrix, Frank Zappa and many others recorded on the ground floor here, so it’s got some magical juju!

  • I’m hoping that feeds into the batch of songs that have been marinating up here for my next album. I think I’ll call it “The Big Follow Up 2.”
  • I recorded a little record here for Larry Wolf, best known as part of Robert Downey, Sr.’s group of actors which made films such as “Putney Slope” and “Pound” in which Larry shared the screen for Robert Downey Jr.’s film debut! His voice is beautifully seasoned and he swings, heavily influenced by the behind-the-beat phrasing of Billie Holiday. It’s just charming and it thrills me that it’s the first thing to be pressed out of my new studio.
  • Still very excited by the Standing “O” Project featuring me last year and its featuring me nationally on the Art of Song radio show. It’s a great site and streaming music service. It took a minute for the site to be ready for primetime on all platforms, but it’s looking great now and I suggest you check it out. standingoproject.com
  • I’ve continued to do hundreds of kids shows around the state each year for the past three or four. I’ve worked with a few different partners doing sort these sort of music and comedy based shows that teach kids how to conserve water and other natural resources. And I just began a new one teaching kids about bullying. I admittedly keep it on the down low here because I don’t like the clothes I wear (!) but the concept is great and the work is highly rewarding. It’s been a big part of my life. It interferes a bit with spending time writing, but it all fits with the mission statement to use art to better the world.
  • Anyway keep checking this page for more. And while you’re here, drop me a line and let me know what’s you’re up to, okay?