SAN DIEGO — San Diego guitar great Peter Sprague’s album-release concert at Tio Leo’s Sunday should be one for the record books. The album’s 23-year-long gestation is almost worthy of a music-fueled reboot of the popular 1960s TV series “The Twilight Zone.”

A past collaborator of such jazz legends as Chick Corea, Sonny Rollins, Hubert Laws and Pat Metheny, Sprague will be selling copies of his new album, “The Width of The World,” at his Tio Leo’s gig. The fact he will not be performing a single selection from it sounds counterintuitive, since album-release concerts are, by definition, designed to promote the album whose release they are celebrating.

But Sprague’s decision to do so — or, rather, not to do so — is a pragmatic necessity.

“The Width of The World” is a 20-minute concerto that he was commissioned to write for the San Diego Symphony in 2002. He performed it here with the orchestra the same year at Copley Symphony Hall, which is now known as Jacobs Music Center.

Adapting his orchestral opus for a guitar-piano-bass-and-drums jazz quartet would be a fool’s errand, artistically speaking. It is also a logistical impossibility.

“You couldn’t fit the brass section of the symphony on the stage at Tio Leo’s,” Sprague said with a laugh, “let alone the entire orchestra!”

No formal recording was made of his “The Width of The World” performance with the symphony. A friend smuggled in a small recording device to tape the show, but its muddled audio quality and extremely low fidelity rendered it largely unusable.

Constantly in demand as a solo artist, accompanist, recording engineer and album producer, Sprague turned to other projects. His versatility has seen him shine on collaborations with singers Dianne Reeves and Al Jarreau, pianists Billy Childs and David Benoit, bass giant Charlie Haden and such disparate artists as former David Bowie keyboardist Mike Garson and sitar standout Kartik Seshardi.

What, then, has led this 2024 San Diego Music Hall of Fame inductee to now record an album version of his concerto?

“I had lymphoma and got past it,” he said. “Now, I have Parkinson’s, which is not bad at the moment, but the general arc is that it gets bad over time. So, there’s a sense of immediacy with a lot of what I’m doing. I’ll be 70 on Oct. 11 and I’m putting a large part of my energy into recording.

“There’s a lot more immediacy I have now as an artist to see things through and do things. Because I’m getting older and have had some health challenges, I can see the writing on the wall. This won’t last forever, for any of us. This album is definitely the biggest project I’ve ever done and I don’t know if I want to do anything this challenging again.”

‘Local Living Legends’

The genesis of “The Width of The World” dates back to early 2002.

It was then that Sprague was contacted by Jung-Ho Pak, who was concluding his tenure as the San Diego Symphony’s music director. Pak had been wowed by a 2000 concert that teamed Sprague with the Grossmont College Orchestra. He invited Sprague to compose a concerto and to perform it with the symphony at a concert billed as “Local Living Legends.”

For the same concert, Pak also featured Grammy Award-winning violinist Mark O’Connor (who was then a Bonsall resident). The triple-bill lineup was completed by now-deceased keyboardist and composer Bruce Donnelly, who performed in the blues-rocking San Diego band the Mighty Penguins, composed film scores and was a former staff songwriter at MCA Publishing.

Sprague took two months off to compose, arrange and hone “The Width of The World.” While he had previously written music for string quartets, this was his first orchestral work. Stylistically, it draws from classical, jazz, baroque, Celtic, flamenco, Middle Eastern music and more.

“Composing this was an awesome task,” the eclectic guitarist said in a 2002 San Diego Union-Tribune interview previewing his concert with the symphony.

“I’ve done smaller pieces and worked with string quartets, but this is a whole other level. A good comparison is writing a letter versus writing a novel. With a novel, you don’t know how it is going to end – and you even wonder: `Is it ever going to end?’ You have to think in big scope.”

And how does Sprague regard his concerto today, 23 years after he debuted it with the San Diego Symphony — and just weeks after he finished recording and mixing his album version of it?

“Someone asked me in 2002 why I wrote a concerto, and I joked that it was for the money!” Sprague said of his labor-of-love composition. “But it was always in my mind that I wanted to hear it done the way I envisioned it originally.

“A lot of it is the same, but there were a few parts in the second movement that Jung-Ho suggested I omit for the concert, and we did. For the new version that I recorded, I added those parts back because they were important to me. At the time of the concert, I thought that maybe Jung-Ho had made some good points and I wanted to go along with his vision.

“Other than that, a lot of it is the same music on the album. The tempos are the same, I just made a couple of changes and a couple of edits. I was really happy with the original piece, so any little changes I made were subtle.”

Even so, transforming a piece that had only been performed once by a full orchestra into a new album without that orchestra was no easy matter.

“I had (computer) files with the music that I’d made for the original composition in Pro Tools. But because they were 23 years old, I couldn’t access them,” Sprague said with a chuckle.

“I had to take them up to these specialists in Los Angeles who specialize in restoring old files. So, there was a month or two of audio forensic work to resurrect it.”

Downsizing

Unable to afford to hire the San Diego Symphony or any other orchestra, Sprague recorded “The Width of The World” this year at his Spragueland Studio in Encinitas. He used a combination of live musicians and his guitar synthesizer, which he deftly employed to perform the parts of various orchestral instruments. It’s the same guitar synthesizer he used 23 years ago to compose his concerto.

“A full orchestra uses 10 or 12 violinists playing in unison to get that really nice, thick sound,” Sprague noted. “So, I used orchestral samples and then real strings. I had a violinist, cellist and contrabassist record each of their parts three times and used all three parts each played to make it sound fuller and richer.”

His 2002 concert with the San Diego Symphony teamed Sprague with fellow guitarist Fred Benedetti, a longtime musical partner. For his new “The Width of The World” album, Sprague played both his and Benedetti’s parts himself.

“Fred played steel-string and nylon-string acoustic guitars at the concert, so that’s what I did for the recording,” said Sprague, who also plays electric guitar on the album.

For a first-time orchestral work by a musician whose expertise is in jazz, not classical music, “The Width of The World” is an impressive achievement. Sprague had led and written for his string consort for years, but in a more intimate jazz-meets-chamber-music mode.

In crafting his first concerto, he happily embraced some of his biggest musical inspirations.

“My biggest influences on the piece were Pat Metheny and Chick Corea,” said Sprague, who has worked with both.

“Some of the parts in the first movement call on the brass section to be like a big band, in terms of rhythmic accuracy, which a lot of orchestral brass sections are not used to doing. One of the biggest lessons I learned doing this in 2002 with the symphony is musical balance.

“With an orchestra, live on stage, there were microphones to turn up to make the flute section or the bassoon louder. In the recording studio, I could really control the balance and make the magic happen using volume control.”

Two of the musicians featured on the new album — drummer Duncan Moore and violinist Bridgit Dolkas — also performed with Sprague at the 2002 concert with the San Diego Symphony.

For his album release concert Sunday at Tio Leo’s, Sprague will perform with Moore, bassist Mackenzie Leighton and pianist Danny Green.

“It would be super cool if we could play something from the album, but that’s not possible,” Sprague said. “So, we’ll play some of my other things, some Beatles songs, and pieces by Antonio Carlos Jobim and Hoagy Carmichael.”

His new album is available from various streaming services and in a limited edition CD run via his website: petersprague.com.

Can Sprague envision ever performing “The Width of the World” again with the San Diego Symphony or any other orchestra?

“It would be challenging, but if anyone is interested I’d love to give it a try,” he said.

“I still have all the written scores for each instrument from the original concert. They’re in storage under my house. So, if they haven’t been eaten by rats, we’re good to go!”

Peter Sprague Quartet, featuring Danny Green, Mackenzie Leighton and Duncan Moore

When: 5 p.m. Sunday, Sept. 7

Where: Tio Leo’s 5302 Napa Street, Bay Park, San Diego

Admission: Free

Online: tioleos.com

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