The Beard and the Bird: lots of time on the road (and the tracks).

Jon Hasz met his future wife, Cathryn (Cat) Curry Hasz, at a music store in Ramona when they were both still in high school. “She was the singer in a punk band,” he explains. “She played guitar, and we would just jam for fun every once in a while. We started dating, and sometime around 2012 I brought home a big white upright bass that I had traded some guitars for. I was like, ‘Hey, this is your new instrument!’ We started getting into a little bit of rockabilly at that time. Basically, the upright bassists in most rockabilly bands are the coolest person, so I knew she was going to go for this. We played casually for fun every once in a while, and then about three years ago, we started actually taking some gigs and writing some stuff together.”

The pair would form a musical duo called The Beard and the Bird that specializes in “western swing music,” an outgrowth of jazz that originated in the late 1920s and blends genres such as country, blues, and Dixieland into highly danceable songs. Jon plays acoustic guitar and sings lead, while Cat adds backing vocals and handles the low end on the upright bass. Jon says the upright bass adds a percussive element to their performances that is unique to the instrument. “When you are doing slap bass you are pulling the string and then you slap it,” he explains. “It’s almost a secondary drummer. That’s why it can be really fun playing with her just as a duo. She’s really holding down that time. Every time she hits the strings, it kind of sounds like a snare. It’s very different than traditional jazz bass, where you are just playing the notes and there is much less percussion.”

But depending on the gig, you may catch The Beard and the Bird as a duo, trio, or even a quartet. “If we’re doing a festival, we almost always have a three-piece,” Jon says. “So when we play Adams Avenue, when we did the Art Walk, when we do Gator by the Bay, those gigs are always with a trio, or a fourth member on slide guitar. But some of the local gigs, like if we play Heroes [Wood-Fired Pizza] up in Julian, or a winery, we will do a duo. It rolls with people’s budgets and preferences.”

The band is consistently out gigging, with shows split pretty evenly between the San Diego region and Buffalo, New York. Pre-Covid, the couple would often vacation in Vancouver, but once the pandemic hit, the border was closed. To avoid going stir crazy, Jon and Cat opted to pick a new place that was close enough to the Canadian border to have the same culture and weather. “That just happened to be Buffalo,” Jon says. “So we dropped into there and I found this massive festival scene out there in the northeast. It’s awe-inspiring. We started playing shows and meeting people out there. Ever since, we’re making our tour loop a little bit bigger. So, we’re working our way down towards Pennsylvania and Cleveland and further into New York.”

While The Beard and the Bird have become a fixture on the live circuit, their digital presence is quite minimal on the streamers. They are looking to remedy that by releasing a series of singles which will lead into a seven-song EP. One of the singles, “Dust if You Must,” is based on the poem of the same name by Rose Milligan. Jon recorded his parts at GCR Audio in Buffalo, New York, a recording studio owned by Goo Goo Dolls bassist Robby Takac. He had booked studio time not really knowing what he actually wanted to record, so the music was basically written on the fly. He was joined by Tyler Westcott on banjo and Aaron Troy on clarinet — two musicians he had never even met. “One of my favorite things to do is meet people for the first time and do something creatively,” he says. “You never know what you are going to get, and there’s such a cool energy there.”

Cat’s bass and vocal parts were recorded at RMC Afterhours Studio in Ramona, a vital location in the story of Jon and Cat. “I bought a music store years ago,” Jon says. “I’ve had Ramona Music Center up here for 17 years, and that is where our studio is built out of. It’s the same store that Cat and I originally met at.”