On October 27, 6-8:30 p.m., the Parks Reece Gallery in Livingston, Mont., will hold a reception to unveil Parks Reece's original painting he did for Michael Hurwitz’s new “Cowboy Fandango” CD. Then, at a 9 p.m. in a show at Livingston's Owl Lounge, Hurwitz debuts music from this new CD. He will appear with satirical singer/songwriter and poet Greg Keeler. Keeler and his sonnets appear in Reece’s critically acclaimed book of art “Call of the Wild.” Keeler has received the Montana Governor’s Award in the Humanities.Hurwitz (pictured above) lives in Alta, just over the Tetons from Jackson. He’s featured on the Wyoming Arts Council Artist’s Roster, and is available for gigs through the Arts Across Wyoming grants program. He is a singer-songwriter with a style somewhere between Western swing and Southern country blues. He has toured extensively for over three decades.
Here’s some info from a press release about how Michael Hurwitz and artist Parks Reese collaborated on this project (courtesy of Robin Hoggan Ebinger):
Wyoming singer/songwriter Michael Hurwitz saw the art and satirical humor of artist Parks Reece and it clicked -- Hurwitz had found the cover art for his upcoming CD "Cowboy Fandango." After Hurwitz and Reece had a long conversation about their similarly strange culinary habits -- from eating porcupines to marmots, pine squirrels to rattlesnakes, and of course the much-loved antelope -- Reece took a road trip across the US with Hurwitz’s previous CDs as his traveling companions. The music made sense and, with that, Reece agreed to do an original painting for "Cowboy Fandango." A relationship was cemented.
It was evident when Hurwitz spoke of his song about dancing badgers that Reece, who considers himself a student of dancing badgers and other bizarre natural phenomena, was the perfect match. Many of the creatures from Hurwitz’s songs and Reece’s imagination appear on the CD, including a centaur cowboy with a striking resemblance to Hurwitz himself.
