Danny Huber doing Live Local Music Series at 2 p.m. on Sept. 24

Upcoming: This September 24 our Live Local Music Series will feature local artist Danny Huber. He plays at 2 p.m. at Parker Library.

This is actually his second visit, as he was in one of our first-ever performances when he was in the band Ten Feet Tall.

Here’s a write-up on Huber from Tom Murphy of Westword fame:

Since he was a kid, Danny Huber has been playing music. Like a lot of people, he started out with classical instruments like violin and trumpet. Unlike a lot of people, Danny was also something of a prodigy. But his parents weren't the social-climbing, type-A personalities that produce neurotic children that play Carnegie Hall at a perilously young age. So Danny pretty much grew up as one of those people of immense talent and ability in more than one area who most of his co-workers only really know for their affability and skill at their jobs.

So would have been Danny's path as well as someone with a good family and great kids in the suburbs. But somewhere along the line, Danny got the yen to share his music with at least some small corner of the world. He took up the guitar as a youngster. Inspired in part by finger picking wizard Leo Kottke as well as by Peter Buck's mastery of the textured melodies, Danny taught himself, or so this story will insist, how to play deceptively simple phrases and tasteful leads on both six and twelve-string guitar. Most rock musicians stop at the six because they can't wrap their heads around twelve.

Unless you press him, Danny won't tell you he was in a cool little power pop band, as its bass player no less, called The Wind-Up Merchants that toured at least twice well outside of Colorado or that said band opened for legendary underground bands at the equally legendary 15th St. Tavern (Denver's equivalent of CBGBs). Whether that would be noise rock adventurists Arab on Radar, pop genius John Vanderslice, Evan Dando of the Lemonheads, Carissa's Weird and Poor Rich Ones. It's the kind of thing indie rockers would brag about for years but Danny doesn't do that.

He went on to actually make money in music by playing in cover bands for a while and he had fun but mostly it taught him more discipline with his craft. Sometimes Danny will play a solo gig with just him and a guitar and the imagination and intelligence behind his lyrics and his songwriting are not the kind of thing that went into Ziggy Stardust or OK Computer or the like. Danny is perfectly capable of such flights of fancy. But the best of his material aims, as does the fiction of John Crowley, at finding the remarkable in things people might find mundane because they've been too conditioned to looking for something in your face and larger than life. You won't find Crowley's transmogrification of Lord Dunsany's fantasies in Danny's music but if you take a chance to listen closely, you'll get a gleaning of that magic and inspiration that some people can find in the every day. A humble genius of subtle pop songcraft or an avid and talented student of master songwriters with far better than average technique? A charlatan with overblown critical praise? Take a listen, see the man play and judge for yourself.

-- Tom Murphy, July 15, 2011