A home on Inverness Ridge is a Bay Area jazz hot spot
A house tucked into the hills of Inverness Ridge has become a destination for some of the world’s most illustrious and interesting musicians. Designed by Sea Ranch architect William Turnbull Jr. with 35-foot wood-paneled ceilings, the home of serial entrepreneur Camille LeBlanc is the venue for Every Blue Moon Concerts, an ongoing concert series whose roster of jazz, classical and experimental music reflects its host’s eclectic tastes.
The next show in the series features the Free Waves Trio, led by an unlikely luminary: Jaron Lanier, the computer scientist known as the “father of virtual reality,” who moonlights as a classical composer and collector of rare instruments. Lanier will be joined by Tim Jackson on flute and saxophone and Zack Olsen on drums at 4 p.m. April 7 at 15 Kehoe Way in Inverness.
Admission is $60. Get more information and buy tickets at everybluemoonconcerts.org or Eventbrite.
A healing community evening
LeBlanc was born in Duxbury, Massachusetts, a seaside town southeast of Boston, and spent much of her life shuttling between New York and the Bay Area for her work in the tech industry. In 2004, she co-founded Roubini Global Economics, a macroeconomic firm. Later ventures included Blancspot, a news app that was once the No. 2 top-selling news app in the United States but ultimately folded earlier this year, and Juice Networks, a multi-channel gaming platform.
“I was bicoastal for 15 years,” LeBlanc says. “And then I decided to finally give up my New York affiliations and just really live out here.”
She now splits her time between Inverness, where she settled in 2012, and her main house in the Berkeley Hills.
LeBlanc began hosting the Every Blue Moon series in 2017 during a difficult time in her life.
“My mother was concluding her life on the East Coast, so I was spending a lot of time flying and sitting at her bedside,” LeBlanc says. “I couldn’t really accept dinner invitations, nor did I have the energy to host dinner parties. It was just an efficient way to have a healing kind of community evening. I wanted to get everyone in a room at once.”
A 9-foot Steinway piano soon arrived on the property, inscribed with the names of dozens of musicians who had played it during its long stay in New York prior to making the trek cross-country. LeBlanc is a classical pianist herself, and for the first performance in the series, she tapped her piano teacher Antonio Iturrioz to perform.
“When he walked in to the house to give me my first piano lesson he said, ‘You live in a concert hall,’” LeBlanc says. “That was an interesting conversation that led to me feeling comfortable charging money for people to cross my threshold.”
Since then, LeBlanc has curated a impressive roster of live performers to play in her home, many of them pianists who can make use of LeBlanc’s Steinway. The limited-capacity seating and relatively remote location on the Inverness Ridge helps foster an intimate, salon-style feeling at these concerts, classier and more convivial than your typical club gig. LeBlanc’s tastes, meanwhile, run counter to the generally rootsy tenor of live music in rural West Marin.
“When I wanted to go hear live music, my options were Americana, maybe some country, maybe some bluegrass,” LeBlanc says. “There weren’t a lot of options that were things that I would be drawn to.”
The most recent concert at Every Blue Moon featured Tord Gustavsen, the Norwegian pianist whom LeBlanc describes as “the Herbie Hancock of Scandinavia.” Backed by bassist Steinar Raknes and drummer Jarle Vespestad — both luminaries in the fruitful Scandinavian jazz scene — Gustavsen epitomizes the sound of the great European jazz label ECM, self-described as “the most beautiful sound next to silence.”
“I will often get people who are coming from the Mondavi Center to my house, or people who have left my house and gone to Herbst Theatre or SFJazz,” LeBlanc says. “So with the people that I get, it’s a very unusual opportunity to have these world-class artists playing in a very intimate setting like that.”
Though LeBlanc’s curations lean towards jazz and classical music, artists from around the world have been represented in prior concerts, including Argentine tango pianist Mariano Barreiro, Persian classical duo Samandar and Sina Dehghani, and Sabir Khan, a sarangi player who “fills stadiums” in his native India.
“My listening history is pretty eclectic,” LeBlanc says. “I’ve always been interested in all or most genres of music as long as it’s really good.”