The Page Brothers Quartet
The Page Brothers Quartet
Andy and Zack Page have been finishing each other's musical sentences since before either could drive. Born four minutes apart and raised in a house where blues records, old-time singing, and hard rock all shared the same air, the twins grew into a guitar and a bass that move like one nervous system, Andy's lines and Zack's low end tracking each other so closely the seam disappears. Under the Page Brothers name they lead a rotating cast through gypsy swing, straight-ahead jazz, fusion, and, when the mood turns, something closer to the metal they never quite outgrew. Tonight the cast runs four deep, and the two players rounding out the quartet have each spent a lifetime making music that record stores never knew where to shelve.
Steve Davidowski was the original keyboardist in the Dixie Dregs, the Georgia fusion band so slippery that, as guitarist Steve Morse liked to say, there was no bin in the record store that could hold them. Davidowski played on the 1975 demo that got them signed and on the 1977 debut Free Fall, then walked away at the band's rising moment to tour with fiddler Vassar Clements. These days he lives up the road in Marshall, running a Monday blues jam, carrying a piccolo on walks through town, and quietly building a mountain-music hybrid he calls Xenobilly. Behind the kit sits Alan Hall, for decades one of the Bay Area's first-call drummers, the one hired when a night could go anywhere: Lee Konitz and Paul McCandless on the jazz side, Cirque du Soleil and the touring company of Wicked on the other. He founded the Asheville Jazz Collective, still teaches for the California Jazz Conservatory from his home in the mountains, and brings the same searching, generous ear to a bar-corner quartet that he brought to festival stages.
What links these four is not a genre but a refusal to settle on one. Every player on the bandstand keeps jazz and rock in the same pair of hands, which means a set can move from Django-flavored swing to a burning straight-ahead tune to something with real teeth in it without anyone breaking stride. It is exactly the kind of unfileable, high-wire music the Monday and Tuesday series exists to make room for: curated, close, and completely free, no cover, in the corner where the horned creature keeps watch and the art on the walls has always run a little stranger than a neighborhood bar strictly requires.
Featuring: Zack Page - Acoustic & Electric Bass, Andy Page - Guitar, Alan Hall - Drums, Steve Davidowski - Keyboard, Saxophone
Free