Today, The Disco Biscuits’ Aron Magner has announced a brand-new solo project called SPAGA. Also featuring bassist Jason Fratacelli and drummer Matt Scarano, SPAGA will see the trio in a stripped-down, acoustic format. Originally conceived two years ago, SPAGA sees Magner getting back to his roots as a pianist.

As he noted in a press release about his history as a musician,

The woman who lived next door to me as a kid was the neighborhood piano teacher. … I started with her early in life and took to it more than others. But I became disinterested by age ten and stopped playing for a bit until I was introduced to jazz when I was 13. … I stopped studying jazz as I explored jam rock with the Biscuits in our infancy, but always maintained an affection for the genre, perhaps bringing a jazzy style to some of the Biscuits improv. … Even going so far as to write songs such as “Smoothie King,” “Soul is Shaking”, or “I Remember Ray” into the Biscuits repertoire. None of them stuck around for high rotation, but they were fun to play none the less. I didn’t have another project they would be appropriate for anyway.

While in The Disco Biscuits, Aron Magner serves as the group’s virtuosic player behind the keys, Magner is also a next-level pianist, with friends encouraging him to perform behind a grand piano for years and explore that side of his artistry. Thus, with the time finally right, Magner began to envision SPAGA as a trio rooted in jazz, allowing the band to improvise while further highlighting his classical and jazz training.

For the new project, Magner found it was important to maintain that SPAGA is a reflection of his origins. As such, he made sure to choose local musicians to join him—first upright bassist Jason Fratecelli who later enlisted drummer Matt Scarano—with the project’s first album, which is due out in early 2019, recorded in a local studio.

“I started with just one song,” Magner recalled in a press release. “The song ’Colors.’  It stayed just that song for probably close to a year before beginning to take steps towards writing more for a project and album in mind.” He continued, “I was having fun just exploring the songs with no preconceptions of what the music actually was yet or for that matter who we were as a trio yet, and that provided for unexpected and welcoming results.”

With the inception of this project coming about organically and locally, Magner began to connect the project to food. As a press release explained,

During the recording sessions, Magner would get in long, enjoyable talks about fresh produce (the kind you get at a farmer’s market), with his engineer, Will Maher, who has an extracurricular interest in field to consumer agriculture and independent food systems— and a passion for it.  The more they talked about it, the more Magner began seeing the connection between the farm-to-table movement and his approach to this new project.  It was all about roots.  With an emphasis on the fresh and the organic.

So when it came time to think about where to unveil this music live, Magner wanted something that would reflect the aesthetic behind it.  In another extension of the synchronicity that has surrounded this project, Magner enlisted one his favorite local award-winning chefs, Yehuda Sichel, to host a gourmet prix-fixed meal in a barn just outside of Philadelphia.  It turns out, the Chef is also a fan of The Disco Biscuits.  Magner became enamored with the juxtaposition of putting a piano inside the barn, and he was excited about the unusual opportunity to connect a master chef’s culinary creations with his original compositions.  It’s not dinner jazz by any means, but the textures and flavors of a farm-to-table meal are set to pair perfectly with the textures and flavors of Magner’s roots music.

Thus, SPAGA will host its first culinary dinner, hosted by award-winning chef Yehuda Sichel, at Hill Girt Farm / SIW Vegetables in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania. As noted by Aron Magner on SPAGA’s website,

A prominent fixture on the farm is the barn, a structure that dates back to the 1600’s (with updates since) where they began doing summer Field to Fork dinners with local chefs using fresh vegetables grown on farm.  This is where I decided to do the first performance of this new project. The juxtaposition of bringing a grand piano into a barn was appealing to me, as its complimentary to the setting, yet simultaneously makes no sense without context. Chef Yehuda Sichel and I first met at his restaurant, Abe Fisher, a few years ago. We have a mutual admiration for each other’s craft. I am thrilled to pair his culinary creations with my music as part of this event in an incredibly serene setting. 

The debut farm-to-table dinner and SPAGA performance will take place on October 5th, at 6:30 p.m., just outside of Magner’s hometown of Philadelphia. For more information on the band, head to the group’s website here, and for tickets to the dinner and concert, head here.