Since an early age he played and experimented with music and musical textures. His first original recording was a short composition that he made with one of his best friends when they were very young. They named it “A can’s odyssey.” it was, by all means, amateurish, but it showed enough creativity to make an impression with their families and friends. The piece had only two instruments (flute and bongos) and a background recording of a soda can being crushed and tossed around. That little song was the starting point in Leon’s musical adventures.
The electronic era brought up by the music of Tangerine Dreams, Tomita, Mike Oldfield and Larry Fast put some new sounds into the music scene. A couple of years later, after the acquisition of two mini-Moog synthesizers and a Syndrum® pad, the duo recorded more original music. For that time around, the material was more cohesive and had a more polished sound to it. Leon remembers, “The hardest thing was transforming my friend’s room into a studio because we only had a reel-to-reel recorder with two microphones attached to it. We had to record everything on one take, and then play it back through a separate amp and record on top of it using the mike. Somehow it worked out all right. I think there was a hunger on us, a hunger about making music which drove us to make things work no matter what the circumstances were.”
After moving to the United States, Leon got involved in the occasional jam session but found the compromising of musical ideas to be very constraining. “It was always a fun thing,” he recalls, “Sometimes I’d be in a studio jamming with one bass player who liked punk rock, a guitar player that liked big band, and I, with my taste in progressive rock playing the drums.”
Advancements in personal computing finally allowed him to make music whilst overseeing all aspects of its creation. Recording became something that happened more often which gave Leon the opportunity to learn how to go about making an album. He then managed to meet some of his collaborators through networking on the internet. Technically, some of the work for “Leon Plays Genesis” was done in Brazil with the majority done at Leon’s studio in the U.S. It is an interesting set of working dynamics, although he concedes that it may not be the most appropriate for every recording task. “Personally, it is a perfect way for someone like me to work,” he explains, “With a regular nine-to-five job, a child in college, another in high-school and a new baby, my time gets very short and I often end up working until very late at night.. Plus, I am a very bad live musician, I need some way to correct my mistakes as I go along and the computer certainly provides me with the opportunity to do just that.”
When not making music, Leon is an award-winning designer and illustrator who creates designs for some of the world’s most respected consumer companies. He also has created album covers and concert tour posters for several bands such as Jethro Tull, Roger Waters, Phil Collins, King’s X and Yes among others.
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