Sunday, September 23rd – 4:30 to 6:30 p.m.
which way west? Sunday concert series.
no cover – but your donations are crucial to help us pay the musicians.

Dan Plonsey, composer & sax player, with band mastermind & bassist Steve Horowitz

What to make of this booking?  Bird & Beckett invites you to come down to the shop and find out this Sunday.  Call it jazz, but bargain for more than you’ve bargained for.  It’s outside, for sure, but it’s tightly focused on sax player Dan Plonsey’s compositions — pushing whatever envelope you can imagine.

Bassist Steve Horowitz has pushed this group into existence and propels it on out with the more than vigorous participation of Scott R. Looney on piano, Steve Adams (of the Rova Saxophone Quartet) playing sax counterpoint to Dan, and John Hanes on drums.

Scott Looney brought us this project, and Steve Horowitz has been frequently sighted at Bird & Beckett dates for awhile now…  Sunday will provide enlightenment about that which anticipation can only allow us hazily to describe.  In any case, expectations are riding high & we’re only gradually wrapping our brains around the whole thing.

A new CD is in hand, and extensive touring by the band is in store for the fall.  Catch them here, in this store, now.  Between now and then, listen here.

From an interview in “Sensitive Skin” with Dan & Steve:

SS: I could probably take an educated guess at what some of your main musical influences are—Beefheart, Coltrane, Braxton, Sun Ra—but what are the some of your major non-musical influences?

STEVE: Kerouac, Dylan Thomas, William Burroughs, Robert Heinlein. I was a strange kid. I read A Happy Death over and over again in high school. It was right next to my copy of Without Feathers.

DAN: Science Fiction was big for me. In my formative years, I read only SF. Everything Philip K. Dick ever wrote. The idea that there are other worlds, other ways of being. It’s therefore natural for me to want to invent my own music, with its own rules. Nowadays I read a lot of contemporary fiction. I like books that aren’t about too much. I like Magnus Mills, Thomas Bernhard, Roberto Bolano, David Foster Wallace, Tao Lin. Of the painters I like the most, I think my music is most like the art of Henri Rousseau, de Chirico, and Rauschenberg. I think about Diebenkorn when I make arrangements: the way his lines are always thickened by other painted-over lines beneath. I also owe a lot to the dadaists, and to the abstract expressionists. I like drawing, and I’m planning to start painting.

read the whole interview by clicking here.

Come on down to the bookshop this Sunday!  Hear for yourself, live in real time.