Event Information
Proceeds to benefit the San Diego Music Foundation's Guitars forSchools program.
Kevin Martin Biography
Meet Kevin Martin - a solo pop-rock songwriter with a sound that’sdescribed as “Burt Bacharach meets Queen and Elton John.” A San Diego native, Kevin got his musical start in taking classical piano lessons after his parents overheard him singing. He started writing songs at age 12 and played his first bar gig with a band at age 16. In high school he honed his vocal skills and won multiple awards for his stage performances in a variety of musicals, and by senior year was voted “Most likely to be on MTV.”While Kevin is technically making his debut as a solo performer, he is a seasoned veteran of performing in rock bands - most notably playing keyboards and co-writing for established San Diego pop-rockers, Get Back Loretta. The band has won a total of six San Diego Music Awards while Kevin has been part of the band. With Get Back Loretta, Kevin has played notable venues such as The Casbah, Belly Up, House of Blues, and the Warfield in SF to crowds of 3000+. Kevin’s style of music is what he calls “Throwback Pop” - which takes his modern flair for performance and combines it with his love of vintage piano-pop stylings.
Inspired Flight Biography
Based in San Diego, California, Inspired Flight fuses the talents of master turntablist, OpenOptics (Eric Poline), and seasoned guitarist/songwriter, Chavez (Gabe Lehner), who both discovered a passion for music at a very young age by falling in love with golden-era hip-hop. As teenagers OpenOptics became obsessed with turntables, collecting records, and DJ’ing, while Chavez became fixated on blues guitar, British rock, and songwriting. The two traveled their respective musical paths with true dedication and passion, honing their skills as musicians, and in 2006 they met when Chavez hired OpenOptics to do scratching on an electronica album he was making under the name of Mechanical Cats. With their shared love of hip-hop, electronica, and recording and producing music, it didn’t take long for the two to collaborate on their own project. The fusion of personalities, backgrounds, and musical interests provided the perfect balance for creating fresh, thought-provoking sounds, and what began as a casual collaboration quickly evolved into Inspired Flight.An Inspired Flight show features live vocals and performance on guitar, keyboards, turntables, kalimbas, and melodica, used with multiple laptops and MIDI controllers. The euphoric, dance-inducing beats of an iF show merge what is mostly original production with tasteful and strategic sampling, leaving audiences "blissed out" and craving more. While the duo has really dialed in their live show to be an unforgettable experience as just the two of them, they often add the element of live drums and feature powerful live female vocals as well as Eligh and/or Scarub of Living Legends as live MC's. As iF evolves they are also adding more live musicians and featured guests creating a big, collaborative musical experience on the stage, all centered around the production of the duo.