Maurice Tani, guitar and vocals.
Pam Brandon, vocals.
Henry Salvia, piano.
Greg Kehret, bass.
Kenny Owen, drums.

$25 suggested; pay what you will!
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BYOB.

Born and raised in San Francisco, Maurice Tani has spent five decades on the California alt-country/Americana scene. Fronting his own bands including 77 El Deora and Calamity & Main, he’s produced numerous albums for himself and others. As a singer songwriter guitar slinger, he’s built a deep repertoire of wryly humorous, darkly romantic songs occupying a genre he’s referred to by many names–Oblique Americana, Twang-Noir… Tani calls it all “Supercalifornographic.”

Maurice was a shade too young for the Summer of Love, but the California culture that gave the world surf guitar, country rock and psychedelia was a profound influence on him. Barely into his twenties and hungry for experience, he moved to central Texas to work the hardcore country, blues and rock circuit between Austin and Dallas, playing five sets a night, seven nights a week for months at a time. He traveled on to New York City just as the punk rock scene at CBGBs and Max’s Kansas City was exploding in Lower Manhattan. By 1977, he was back in San Francisco where punk, power pop and new wave were taking hold. He enjoyed a five-year stretch in the Phantom Movers, a band led by Roy Loney, erstwhile front man for the Flamin’ Groovies. Maurice’s tenure with the Phantom Movers is documented on four critically acclaimed albums.

Through the rest of the ’80s and ’90s, Maurice was the lead guitarist and a featured vocalist for the Zasu Pitts Memorial Orchestra and Big Bang Beat, two large, 12-18 piece dance bands that gained worldwide exposure from a 2 hour PBS New Years Eve tri-mulcast (2 television stations with different views and FM stereo radio audio all broadcasting simultaneously) that was broadcast annually for many years on public TV around the US and Europe. Since then, it’s been a long road writing songs, leading bands, making albums, and playing for the kind of people he sings about. It’s not hard to imagine yourself a character in Maurice’s darkly visionary narratives.

Maurice’s band today features four sterling musicians, long-time collaborators including a legendary piano player–with our favorite British Americana artist from the western edge of the Shropshire Plain, one of the very few British Americana artists from said landscape, lending vocal support to Maurice’s dark tales of crime, romance and the fashion industry, gathered and presented for your consideration in “the sangoire sets.”