Leon Patillo is an American Contemporary Christian

Contemporary Christian music

Contemporary Christian music is a genre of modern popular music which is lyrically focused on matters concerned with the Christian faith...

 singer and evangelist.

Career

Patillo's first musical endeavor was with the group Creation, later called Leon's Creation. Formed in the late 1960s, Creation was a funk

Funk

Funk is a music genre that originated in the mid-late 1960s when African American musicians blended soul music, jazz and R&B into a rhythmic, danceable new form of music. Funk de-emphasizes melody and harmony and brings a strong rhythmic groove of electric bass and drums to the foreground...

 group similar in style and composition to Sly & the Family Stone

Sly & the Family Stone

Sly and the Family Stone were an American rock, funk, and soul band from San Francisco, California. Active from 1966 to 1983, the band was pivotal in the development of soul, funk, and psychedelic music...

; they were signed to Atlantic Records

Atlantic Records

Atlantic Records is an American record label best known for its many recordings of rhythm and blues, rock and roll, and jazz...

. Aside from Creation, Patillo worked at times with Funkadelic

Funkadelic

Funkadelic was an American band most prominent during the 1970s. The band and its sister act Parliament, both led by George Clinton, began the funk music culture of that decade.-History:...

 and Martha & the Vandellas. In 1973, Patillo joined Santana

Santana (band)

Santana is a rock band based around guitarist Carlos Santana and founded in the late 1960s. It first came to public attention after their performing the song "Soul Sacrifice" at the Woodstock Festival in 1969, when their Latin rock provided a contrast to other acts on the bill...

, appearing on the albums Borboletta

Borboletta

Borboletta is the sixth studio album by Santana. It is one of his jazz-funk-fusion oriented albums, along with "Caravanserai", "Welcome", "Love, Devotion and Surrender" with John McLaughlin, and "Illuminations" with Alice Coltrane, Jack DeJohnette and Jules Broussard...

and Festival. He remained with Santana until 1979, launching a solo career on Word Records

Word Records

Word Records is a Christian record label based in Nashville, Tennessee. It is a division of Word Entertainment , which, itself is co-owned by Warner Music Group and Curb Records...

. He released a string of successful albums on the CCM market in the 1980s, and had his own television show on TBN

Trinity Broadcasting Network

The Trinity Broadcasting Network is a major American Christian television network. TBN is based in Costa Mesa, California, with auxiliary studio facilities in Irving, Texas; Hendersonville, Tennessee; Gadsden, Alabama; Decatur, Georgia; Miami, Florida; Tulsa, Oklahoma; Orlando, Florida; and New...

 called Leon and Friends.

Patillo founded his own record label

Record label

In the music industry, a record label is a brand and a trademark associated with the marketing of music recordings and music videos. Most commonly, a record label is the company that manages such brands and trademarks, coordinates the production, manufacture, distribution, marketing and promotion,...

, Positive Pop, in the 1990s, and his most recent releases have been on this imprint. In 1995, Patillo was featured in the Warren Chaney

Warren Chaney

Warren Herbert Chaney, Ph.D. is an American executive, author, filmmaker, behavioral scientist, entertainer, businessman and a pioneer in early television. In a career spanning four decades, Chaney wrote fifteen books, fourteen screenplays, and seventy-eight professional and nonprofessional...

 docudrama

Docudrama

In film, television programming and staged theatre, docudrama is a documentary-style genre that features dramatized re-enactments of actual historical events. As a neologism, the term is often confused with docufiction....

, America: A Call to Greatness

America: A Call to Greatness

America: A Call to Greatness is a 1995 docudrama feature from Paige-Brace Cinema, chronicling United States history from its inception through the 20th century. It stars Charlton Heston, Mickey Rooney, Deborah Winters, Peter Graves, Jane Russell, and Rita Moreno among others and was written,...

.

For years, Patillo pastored the Rock House Church on the historic Queen Mary

RMS Queen Mary

RMS Queen Mary is a retired ocean liner that sailed primarily in the North Atlantic Ocean from 1936 to 1967 for the Cunard Line...

 in Long Beach, California

Long Beach, California

Long Beach is a city situated in Los Angeles County in Southern California, on the Pacific coast of the United States. The city is the 36th-largest city in the nation and the seventh-largest in California. As of 2010, its population was 462,257...

 but since retired the ministry in late 2009 in favor for traveling and leading seminars across the country.

Discography

• Dance Children Dance (1979)
• Don't Give In (1981)
• I'll Never Stop Lovin' You (1982)
• Live Experience (1983) U.S. Top Contemporary Christian albums No. 10
• Sky's the Limit (1984) U.S. Christian No. 5
• Love Around the World (1985) U.S. Christian No. 7
• A Funny Thing Happened (1986)
• Brand New (1987) U.S. Christian No. 8
• On the Way Up (1989)
• Christmas with Leon (1992)
• Hands of Praise (1992)
• Church Is on the Move (1993)
• The Classics (1996)
• I Can (1999)
• Souly for Him (2002)
• Breathe on Me (2005)
• Live Experience 2 (2005)

External links