Blog :: Congratulations Dan!

Congratulations to my friend and colleague Dan Plonsey, who has just been named a USA Fellow by the organization United States Artists.

I first met Dan around twenty years ago in Berkeley. Sheldon Brown and I were playing duets on the street and Dan walked by so we were introduced. Dan plays the saxophone and writes music that is plain spoken and very direct, just like his speaking style, and also can be extremely weird, but as if it comes from a planet where extremely weird is perfectly normal -- there is nothing contrived or artificial about it. I remember watching him play his way out of an enormous paper bag, and I once played the part of the ghost in a production of Hamlet that he directed using improvising musicians at Venue 9 in San Francisco (can't remember exactly how that one worked).

Dan curated the concert series at Berkeley's legendary Beanbenders for many years and the place reflected his values: cheerful, reasonable, open-minded. One of my favorite records of his is Understanding Human Behavio. For me Dan's art and music are the tragedy of innocence -- this record gets it pretty well, and the story that he wrote in the booklet will break your heart.

To find out more about Dan's activities, including the opera that he wrote with Harvey Pekar and his group Daniel Popsicle, you should visit his website.

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