Mary Flower is an internationally renowned, award-winning guitarist and educator from Portland. She has taught at Centrum Blues many times and for 14 years has been the artistic director of her own guitar intensive, Blues in the Gorge, near Portland.

This singer/guitarist/songwriter is a prodigious talent whose seasoned skills have established her as one of America’s foremost roots performers. Flower combines a deep historical knowledge with a restless creativity that keeps her music evolving into new creative territory while echoing influences from Piedmont to the Mississippi Delta, with additional stops at ragtime, swing, folk, and hot jazz.

Saxophone/clarinet player Leon Cotter has led a varied musical life, spending much of the last decade touring the country with soul/blues band The California Honeydrops, while maintaining a reputation as a sought-after sideman and bandleader in Portland’s local jazz scene.

It was a chance encounter on a plane, then 3 years later at a festival, that sparked this harmonious collaboration. Both musicians share a love for the old jazz, blues and ragtime music and are inspired to write their own compositions reminiscent of that century-old music.

“Mary Flower’s masterful, yet comfortable, virtuosity melds with Leon Cotter’s smooth, wide-ranging improvising to give us a complex, fascinating take on two brilliant musicians at the height of their powers. This duo is magic!”
-Meredith Carson, KGNU Radio, Boulder

Marry Flower and Leon Cotter will perform at the Sail on Sister Blues Cruise on Saturday, July 4.