Gigs are like buses sometimes, but that covers a lot of possibilities.

You could say that they're both usually late enough to be inconvenient; you could say they're both usually either too crowded or too quiet. On the bright side, you don't normally find your shoes sticking to the carpet because of spilt beer on a bus.

Glenn Moffatt plays with Chet O'Connell on March 3.

But what I was thinking of is, somewhat anticlimactically but in happy compliance with Occam's razor, the most obvious and clichéd connection – the thing about waiting around and then two coming at the same time.

And that's exactly what's going to happen next Thursday, March 3.

Fortunately, it will only be people with broad and eclectic musical tastes who are disadvantaged by this clash. Unfortunately, I really want to be at both gigs.

Cut to the chase

So, enough beating around the bush. Rather than run the story of one gig then the other, I'll just lay them both out for you – descriptions later...

At the Tauranga Art Gallery, from 7pm on Thursday, March 3, The Carnivorous Plant Society is performing. Tickets from the gallery are $25 or $20 for students and Friends of the Gallery. Across town at The Matua, from 7pm on the same night, Glenn Moffatt and Chet O'Connell play. Tickets from The Matua cost $10.

On the surface these two acts have absolutely nothing in common. Glen and Chet are an acoustic guitar duo who play country music; The Carnivorous Plant Society is a five-piece who play a bunch of instruments including trumpet, keyboards, violin, vibraphone, guitar, bass, drums mellophone, flugelhorn, ocarina, tuba, congas and more. Their music sometimes resembles jazz. Let's dig a little deeper.

Musical memories

In the late-1990s Glen was the rising country star in New Zealand. His album ‘Somewhere in New Zealand Tonight' showed great promise and he was a finalist in the Silver Scroll Awards.

Then, in 2002 he moved to Australia. He's been living in Brisbane ever since.
And Glen's been busy there. He's played with a bunch of people and was in a band, the Smokin' Crawdads, which won at the Queensland Country Music Awards. But much of his time has been taken up with raising three children.

It was when the youngest turned five that Glen decided to get back into the recording studio, producing his first solo album in a decade – ‘Superheroes & Scary Thing' – in 2014. Now he's home again – he's a Napier boy – doing a small acoustic tour of New Zealand along with guitarist Chet O'Connell, a first-call sideman in the blues and country worlds whom people here may have seen playing with Midge Marsden.

On to the Carnivorous Plant Society. I completely fell for these guys last Easter at the Jazz Festival.

They are fronted by one of the horns from The Hipstamatics, trumpeter and keyboard player Tim Scoles, and were both weird and wonderful – two of my favourite musical food groups. What they play is largely instrumental. There was a bit of whistling and the odd vocal but I don't remember any actual lyrics. The most unusual thing was the music itself, which some people apparently describe as 'cinematic jazz”.

I guess it is jazz of a sort. What I heard resembled nothing more than the evocative soundtrack for an imaginary Ennio Morricone western.

Morricone became famous for his early work with Sergio Leone on a series of ‘spaghetti' Westerns, often starring Clint Eastwood as the ‘Man with No Name', as existential outlaw figure. Aside from Leone's striking use of close-ups (and much else), the films have the most fantastic soundtracks, making colourful use of pretty much all the instruments featured in the Carnivorous Plant Society line-up. It's very visual music that paints mental pictures and constantly surprises and delights.

There will also be animated projections.

So there you go. Two gigs and you can't go to both. Imaginary cowboys or guys with cowboy hats. Maybe they aren't so different after all.

watusi@thesun.co.nz