DOMi & JD Beck Bring Their Two-Person Machine to Park West
DOMi & JD Beck play Park West, the keys-and-drums duo whose arrangements move faster than most full bands manage.
🎹 Tuesday night in Lincoln Park
🎹 What the two of them do
DOMi plays keys, JD Beck plays drums, and between them they cover parts that normally take five people. The writing sits somewhere between bebop and video-game music, with unison lines that land on the same sixteenth note across both instruments. DOMi came through the Paris Conservatoire, and Beck taught himself. Live, the arrangements run tighter than the records, and the two of them keep eye contact through most of the set because the cues are that fast.
🏛 Park West as a room
Park West opened in 1917 as a movie palace and was rebuilt as a music venue in the 1970s. It seats about 750 across a sunken floor and two tiered levels, and the tiers matter here, every row looks down at the stage rather than over the head in front. The sound system is built for detail rather than volume, which suits a duo whose whole appeal is hearing exactly what each hand is doing.
🕐 Planning the night
Doors are before the 7:30 PM start and the tiered tables fill from the front. Park West sits on Armitage just west of Clark, a five-minute walk from the Armitage Brown Line stop. Street parking in Lincoln Park is permit-restricted after 6:00 PM, so the train is the simpler approach. Old Town's bars and theaters are ten minutes south on Wells Street if the night keeps going.
