Keeping Company Bill Laurance & Michael League

• 1 Katerina 01:56
• 2 You 04:03
• 3 Yours 02:54
• 4 Escher 03:03
• 5 How Does It Feel 04:17
• 6 Stonemaker 05:49
• 7 Africa 04:16
• 8 Clay 02:14
• 9 Where You Wanna Go 03:44
• 10 Trails 05:42
• 11 Iki Keklik, Bir Kayada 04:27
• Total Runtime 42:25

Info for Keeping Company

Bill Laurance and Michael League, longtime friends and collaborators, have released their second duo album “Keeping Company,” which contrasts with the larger scale of Snarky Puppy. The album showcases an intimate musical partnership, with Laurance focusing on acoustic piano and League on fretless bass and oud, creating a rich, sparse sound that blends Western and Middle Eastern influences. Building on their successful debut, “Where You Wish You Were,” they emphasize deeper exploration and personality while prioritizing live recordings to capture organic spontaneity. Laurance’s use of a lightly prepared piano adds texture, while League's self-taught approach to the oud introduces exotic timbres and expressive nuances. Their partnership thrives on experimentation, with Laurance’s clear, compact melodies complementing League's unique ornaments. “Keeping Company” serves as a snapshot of their evolving friendship and artistic dialogue, highlighting spontaneity and shared humor in their music.

Bill Laurance, piano
Michael League, oud, fretless bass, vocals

Produced by Bill Laurance, Michael League & Nic Hard

Bill Laurance
Pianist, keyboardist and composer Bill Laurance’s music evokes a striking sense of time and place. As an original member of 5-time Grammy Award-winning group Snarky Puppy, Laurance has toured the world countless times, playing hundreds of concerts to tens of thousands of fans worldwide.

Attending the University of Leeds, he majored in classical composition, exploring jazz, funk and drum’n’bass in addition to classical music. Since then he has honed the melodic immediacy of this approach, along with his intense improvisational prowess, forging a distinctive personal style that embraces English classical, electronica and jazz-rock sensibilities, alongside gritty contemporary grooves.

In the early-noughties, a twenty-something Laurance was trying to make a living on the Leeds music scene, when an unremarkable but timely pick-up gig presented itself with a young Michael League in singer Michael Solomon Williams’ band. Gigs in the north of England forged a friendship with League, who happened to be looking for a new piano player, and League invited Laurance to the US to record the first Snarky Puppy album, The Only Constant, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Since then, Laurance has clocked up recordings and or performances with such renowned artists as David Crosby, Morcheeba, Salif Keita, Terence Blanchard, Susana Baca, Lalah Hathaway, Laura Mvula, Jacob Collier, Musiq Soul Child, Khalid Sansi, Chris Potter, Lionel Loueke, Carlos Malta, The Metropole Orchestra and the WDR Big Band. He has also worked extensively in the dance world with companies including Alvin Ailey, Ballet Rambert, Matthew Bourne's Adventures in Motion Pictures, Phoenix Dance, Northern Ballet Theatre and the English National Ballet. He has also composed music for a variety of different clients including Apple, Sky, Nokia and Hewlett Packard.

He is a champion of cutting-edge keyboard developments and is endorsed by: Moog, Mellotron, Sequential, Korg, Nord, Roli Seaboard, Yamaha, Roland, Arp Odyssey, Keyscape, Sound Brenner, Native Instruments and MXR. Alongside Laurance’s touring as a solo artist and with Snarky Puppy, Laurance is the Artist in residence at Morley College London. He is is a passionate educator and continues to give clinics at music institutions all over the world.

Michael League
is a 4-time GRAMMY award-winning, multi-instrumentalist, producer, composer, arranger, songwriter, label owner, and bandleader based out of Catalonia, Spain. Aside from founding and leading Snarky Puppy and Bokanté, Michael has worked with and/or produced for a diverse range of artists spanning multiple genres, including David Crosby, Esperanza Spalding, Michael McDonald, Kirk Franklin, Jacob Collier, Laura Mvula, Chris Potter, TOKiMONSTA, Susana Baca, and more. Over the course of 2021, League will produce 12 records, the first of which is his debut solo album. Usually surrounded by collaborators, this album marks a departure in that League is performing every instrument, as well as singing, on songs written alone during the COVID-19 pandemic. League’s debut album, So Many Me, is co-produced and mixed by 2-time GRAMMY award-winner, Nic Hard, and was mastered by GRAMMY award- winning engineer, Emily Lazar, whose wins and nominations include her work on Colors by Beck, Chandelier by Sia, Djesse Vol. 3 by Jacob Collier, Wasting Light by the Foo Fighters, and more.

Booklet for Keeping Company