The Music of Ben Luco and the Funky Divine
Ben Luco, a professional musician and composer now located in Sacramento, California, showed his love for music at an early age beginning with the cello at age four, then moving to the piano, studying Royal Conservatory of Music curriculum, and later making a permanent move to the saxophone at age nine. Ben’s love for music was demonstrated in his active participation in junior and senior high school orchestras, jazz ensembles, stage production pit bands and solo performances. During his formative years, Ben studied Jazz at Malaspina University College in Nanaimo, British Columbia and at the Berklee School of Music in Boston, MA. He won many awards the most notably being the Canada Millennium Scholarship and a Berklee Music Scholarship award.
As a well-seasoned performer, Ben has maintained his interest and ability to play a diverse style of music such as classical jazz, blues, rhythm and blues, funk jazz, and rock. His professional experience includes playing with several jazz groups in British Columbia, Washington DC, Seattle WA, Mexico and Sacramento CA. He has performed with several bands and as a band leader has written, performed, recorded and produced his own original Funk Jazz CD’s geared toward energetic dance crowds. His up tempo, passionate compositions and performance styles always delight his audiences and engage them to move to the high-energy beat.
Ben has composed, performed and produced two CD’s both of which are original Funk Jazz music. The first CD, “Denouement”, is titled to reflect the chemistry needed to pull the complex sequence of events together to create music and produce a world-class CD.
This album contains music performances of some of the best musicians in the Sacramento performing arts scene featuring Steve Homan on guitar, Rob Lemas on bass, John Kurimai on drums, and Ben on tenor and alto saxophones. The sound engineer was Henry Robinet, and Mark Wilsher, well know in the San Francisco area for high quality CD Mastering.
Continuing with his prolific ability to compose, Ben completed his second CD titled “In the Pocket” and features a team of musicians who continue to produce a bold, up-beat sound that is complete, engaging and simply “In the Pocket”. “In the Pocket” includes well known Sacramento musicians Brett Conner and Henry Robinet on guitar, Chip Conrad and Rick Lotter on drums, Reggie Balino on bass, and conga and percussion by Mario Sebastion and Guy Kowarsh. “In the Pocket” was recorded, engineered, mixed and mastered by Guy Kowarsh and co-produced by Ben Luco and Guy Kowarsh. This album is a true example of “in your face” passionate Funk Jazz.
Ben’s passion for creating new music continues. Watch for his upcoming gigs and events on this website.
