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The Baked Potato

Posted on: 28 December 2025

I went to a wedding in Philadelphia and approximately one week later I was due to record at Platinum Sound & Mastering in Salt Lake City. At this point in my life, I had never been to Los Angeles and yet it was in my mind as somewhere I would love to visit because of its musical history. As a young boy I had watched Lee Ritenour’s music tuition videos which also featured clips of hius band playing at a club in Burbank called ‘The Baked potato’. I had also, of course, read about Sound City Studios in Van Nuys, where David Grohl got that enormous drum sound o Nirvana’s ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’. I had also read about the studio scee in Los Angeles, particularly in the writings of Tommy Tedesco, a famous session guitarist of the 70, 80s, and 90s.

So, with my spare days between the wedding in Philadelphia and the recording sessions in Salt Lake City, I decided to ‘discover’ Los Angeles.

One of the first things I did upon my arrival was to seek out the jazz club from Lee Ritenour’s tuition videos – The Baked Potato. The first night that I went there, I sat at the bar and ordered a baked potato, which is apparently what one does at The Baked Potato…. The a girl sat next to me and also ordered a baked potato we said hello to each other and continued to munch o our said root vegetable in solitary culinary mode. The band playing was the Jeff Kollman Trio, lead by a fantastic guitarist called, b elieve it or not, Jeff Kollman. If you are into rock guitar and great shredding, then I highly recommend you check him out.

Anyway, Jeff suddenly announced that Aubrey would come up on stage and play with them. Aubrey was my fellow potato muncher at the bar. She got up and played some great solos with the band. She then becasme a lot more interesting to me and we struck up conversation and hung out quite a bit for the following few days. She turned out to be a great bluegrass fiddle player with quite an interesting back story. Let me tell you a little about that in summarised form. But first, here’s a snippet of one of the solos she played:

Aubrey grew up in Spokane in rural Washington state. As a young child, her parents joined a religious cult. her grandfather was worried about her wellbeing and took her from the cult commune and they went on the road together as he entered into fiddle competitions to earn money. Then, when she got a bit older, she thought she would try her luck in Los Angeles. I met her before she joined Shooter Jenning’s band, who she now tours with for the majority of the year. In fact she was coincidentally touring with Shooter Jennings and performing in Madrid when I was recording a video of Get Lucky, a cover of a song by the French group Daft Punk. Here is that video: