Alexander / Andy McLeod / Del Rossi Trio
Brickbat Books
709 S 4th St.
South Philadelphia
April 21, 2026
No PA? No problem! Regular readers of my recaps know by now that I love a quiet, no-fuss show. Brickbat is one of the coolest bookstores in the city – the country, even – and besides having an awesome collection of literature, music and art books, I love the atmosphere they engender on the regular with the small gigs they occasionally host. Last night was no different: a revue of entirely acoustic, almost-completely instrumental music – with brief forays into singing from Alexander, the solo endeavor of the Connecticut-based multi-instrumentalist David Shapiro. Rounding out the bill besides Shapiro was Andy McLeod, the finger-style guitarist and Dobro player, plus the Del Rossi Trio, giving only their second performance to date.
Listening to Del Rossi Trio, I thought of landscapes: particularly, the way they seem to subtly shift and change when viewed from tens of thousands of feet in flight, presenting the persistent illusion of stillness despite the fact of infinite intricate activity taking place (not to mention the fact that you’re moving at hundreds of miles an hour all the while). The trio, composed of droning harmonium, cello and bass clarinet, played two long, meditative pieces: this was eyes-closed music, drifting slowly in and out of consonance, wide-open modal harmonies inching toward tension and rich, crazy clusters of notes and harmonic traffic jams. Bass clarinetist Matthew Smith Lee’s cheeks would softly flutter on long-held notes, and the cello and harmonium essentially blended into one big, pulsing sound. The second and final piece – titled, for now, “Blues in G” – was the more mischievous, playing with blues vocabulary like b7’s and minor 3rds and the blues scale, but still patient and blurry, like what the blues might sound in zero gravity.
Bringing us back down to Earth, Andy McLeod punctuated his pieces, performed unaccompanied switching between Dobro and acoustic guitar, with stories of horrific tractor-induced deaths… okay, just one, and it was more a brief allusion. The Virginia-based McLeod is an adroit picker of tunes, with a taste for the romantic chord change (there was a French piece that really had that major-minor flavor) and a flair for the bouncy interplay between moving basslines and jumpy melodies. No stranger to Brickbat, McLeod performed pieces both selected and written himself with deep composure; whether playing his own compositions or old and far-flung music, he dove in like he owned it. I especially enjoyed the closing piece, his Dobro growling in an open minor tuning, self-proclaiming it “horror music” as inspired by the Ozzy Osbourne documentary (apparently the impetus behind Sabbath was noticing “how long the line for the horror movies is”).
Alexander (the nom de plume of the aforementioned Shapiro) closed out the evening with a beautiful array of pieces, most of which were his own compositions but also included arrangements of Sacred Harp tunes, like “All Is Well," coincidentally also marvelously re-arranged by Sam Amidon, who I caught a few weeks back. Alexander’s version took place on an open-G-tuned 12-string guitar, sounding absolutely rich and magnificent; ever the road dog, Shapiro just finished up a tour accompanying the great Kath Bloom only a few days ago and immediately left for this solo trip, but left his six-string at home presumably because temperature and humidity fluctuations on the road had put it in a sorry state. No matter: the 12-string couldn’t have sounded better, and Alexander’s flexible fretting hand and command of counterpoint and chord inversions (pinky stretched FAR to capture high notes over low bass) was up to the task.
