Veteran saxophonist Norbert Stachel and multi flutist Karen Stachel perform with their LehCats project, combining modern jazz, funk, Afro/Latin, and world fusion music. Focusing on their original music, the Stachels have honed their vast and varied experiences into a seamless, melodically charged sound in LehCats. 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.

Born in Puerto Rico in 1963, Giovanni Hidalgo grew up in a home filled with the drums, bongos, congas and timbales used by his father and grandfather, both musicians themselves. Educated in Latin rhythms from childhood onward, he regularly walked to local gigs with his congas strapped to his back as a teen. He soon caught the attention of the legendary Dizzy Gillespie, touring in his United Nations All-Star Orchestra for four years; Hidalgo also became a noted session player, recording with Freddie Hubbard, Paul Simon, and Mickey Hart‘s Planet Drum project.

Some of the encounters Giovanni mentions are Dizzy Gillespie, Art Blakey, George Harrison, Steve Winwood, Jim Capaldi, Airto Moreira, Flora Purim, and Mickey Hart and his Planet Drum group.