Veteran saxophonist Norbert Stachel and multi flutist Karen Stachel perform with their LehCats project, combining modern jazz, funk, Afro/Latin, and world fusion music. They are joined on this night by the legendary Latin percussionist Giovanni Hidalgo, arguably the greatest living conguero.
Saxophonist Stachel grew up in El Cerrito in the 1970s, but he found his people in the Berkeley High jazz program, where he forged a deep creative connection with multi-instrumentalist Peter Apfelbaum and played a key role in successive incarnations of the composer’s groundbreaking Hieroglyphics Ensemble. Not to mention his tenure as a key soloist on many recordings and performances with Bay Area legends Pete Escovedo and also composer/guitarist Ray Obiedo.
Based in New York for the past two decades, Stachel spent much of his career as a first-call sideman, touring widely with acts like Prince, Sheila E, Boz Scaggs, Diana Ross, Tony! Toni! Toné!, Roy Hargrove, and Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters. He also spent four years with Tower of Power, but over the past decade he’s concentrated on co-leading LehCats with his wife, jazz-and-classical flutist Karen Stachel (née Anderson). She’s got deep Bay Area ties herself. Part of the burgeoning acid jazz scene of the early ‘90s, the Karen Anderson Jazztet featured guitarist John Schott and drummer Scott Amendola. Her eclectic resume includes stints with Narada Michael Walden, Bob Weir and Ratdog, the New Amsterdam Symphony Orchestra, and trumpeter Wallace Roney’s 2014 project “Universe,” a previously unheard suite of music written for Miles Davis in 1968 by Wayne Shorter.
Focusing on their original music, the Stachels have honed their vast and varied experiences into a seamless, melodically charged sound in LehCats.