JAZ DELOREAN + LOGAN METZ

"BAR-ROOM PIANO BRAWL" TOUR

There are piano concerts. There are singer-songwriter concerts. And then there are nights when two travelling musical mavericks sit down behind a pair of pianos and nobody — quite possibly including the musicians themselves — knows exactly where the evening is going to end up.

In January 2027, Jaz Delorean, frontman, songwriter and piano-pounding ringmaster of Tankus, joins American songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Logan Metz, known for his work with Lukas Nelson & Promise of the Real, Neil Young and Willie Nelson, for what promises to be one of the most unusual intimate shows yet staged at Barnoldswick Music & Arts Centre.

This isn't a conventional double bill. Delorean and Metz will be onstage together, armed with two pianos, guitar, accordion, a formidable catalogue of songs and stories and, as they wonderfully describe it, "a vague but groovy plan."

Jaz Delorean has spent much of his musical life in motion. Singer, songwriter, pianist and raconteur, he is best known as the charismatic frontman and principal songwriter of Tankus, a band whose gloriously difficult-to-categorise music crashes together New Orleans piano, rock 'n' roll, jazz, funk, psychedelia and old-fashioned travelling-show theatre.

It's a reputation forged the proper way — gig after gig, town after town and country after country. Tankus have played well over a thousand shows, taking their music from tiny clubs to major international festivals including Glastonbury, Montreux Jazz Festival, WOMAD and Boomtown, alongside extensive touring throughout Europe.

And Delorean himself is very much at the centre of the storm. Reviewing Tankus at London's legendary 100 Club, Joyzine wrote that he possesses "charisma in spades and the talent to match," while another live review described him simply as the band's "ultimate showman." Elsewhere, his extraordinary singing voice has been memorably described as "gravel on velvet."

Yet remove the brass, drums, electric guitars and glorious chaos of Tankus and another side of Delorean emerges — the songwriter and storyteller. His solo performances return the songs to something closer to the circumstances in which many were first conceived: around a piano, on the road, in quiet rooms, around campfires or aboard the riverboat he calls home.

That intimate approach was beautifully captured on his 2025 solo release Live By Lamplight, recorded at London's Jamboree with Delorean alone at an upright piano, singing to an audience gathered around him and recording directly to analogue tape. It exposed the bones beneath the theatricality: melody, lyric, character and story.

Meanwhile, Tankus opened another chapter in 2025 with their fourth studio album, Valley Of Distraction, produced by Jim Sclavunos of Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds and Grinderman. A more recent appraisal of the band neatly summed up Delorean's musical world as combining "bar-band boisterousness with his own style of beat poetry." That description could almost have been written specifically for a tour called Bar-room Piano Brawl.

Then there's the man sitting behind the other piano.

Logan Metz is a Wisconsin-based songwriter, pianist, multi-instrumentalist, educator and raconteur whose musical life reads like several careers rolled into one. His songwriting moves freely through jazz, country, folk, blues and rock, held together by sophisticated chord changes, character-driven storytelling and a deliciously dry lyrical wit rooted somewhere in the great American piano-songwriting tradition of Tom Waits, Randy Newman and Leon Russell.

Metz moved from Milwaukee to Los Angeles at 18, studying screenwriting and philosophy before teaching music and English in East LA. His fascination with literature and songwriting eventually took him to the University of Chicago, where his master's thesis became a full-length 1960s rock-opera adaptation of Shakespeare's Othello — which perhaps tells you something about the wonderfully unconventional musical mind behind the songs.

His 2016 debut album, The Last Remaining Payphone In L.A., attracted serious critical attention. All About Jazz recognised the New Orleans influence running through the record while making it clear that Metz's musical vocabulary stretched considerably further, particularly praising its "expert songwriting" and skilful arrangements.

Then his musical journey took an extraordinary turn when Metz joined Lukas Nelson & Promise of the Real as a multi-instrumentalist, playing keyboards, lap steel, banjo, harmonica and adding vocals. Over the following years he found himself performing alongside an extraordinary roll call of musicians including Neil Young, Stephen Stills, Joe Walsh, Eddie Vedder, Warren Haynes, Bob Weir, Robby Krieger and John Densmore.

And then came another invitation. In 2023, Metz began playing piano on tour with Willie Nelson.

Think about that journey for a moment — from literary-minded songwriter and music teacher to sharing stages with some of the defining figures in American music, eventually sitting behind a piano alongside Willie Nelson himself.

Yet Metz never stopped being a songwriter in his own right. Ten years after The Last Remaining Payphone In L.A., new solo material has begun appearing, including "Sunrise" and "Overrated," signalling the next chapter in a recording career that has spent much of the past decade taking second place to an extraordinary life on the road.

And it was the road that ultimately brought Metz and Delorean together. After Metz joined Tankus for UK shows, a musical friendship developed — and rather than simply repeating the conventional headline-and-support format, the pair decided upon something far more interesting.

Put both pianos onstage.

Sit down together.

And see what happens.

That's the wonderfully loose concept behind the Bar-room Piano Brawl Tour. There'll be songs swapped across the stage, stories from the road, piano, guitar, accordion, improvisation and almost certainly moments that neither musician had planned when they walked into the room.

There's something deliciously old-school about the whole thing: part smoky New Orleans drinking den, part Greenwich Village songwriter night, part travelling medicine show and part after-hours gathering where two musicians start swapping songs and suddenly realise it's three o'clock in the morning.

Delorean brings the British travelling-show spirit, barrelhouse piano, cabaret noir and battered romanticism. Metz brings Americana, jazz harmony, country soul and the literate, sideways humour of the great American piano storytellers. Between them are musical connections stretching from Glastonbury and Montreux to Neil Young and Willie Nelson.

But Barnoldswick isn't getting a history lesson.

It's getting the pair of them in the room, together, at the same time.

Songs will be traded. Stories will undoubtedly wander off course. Pianos may be assaulted. Accordions may become involved. And somewhere between carefully crafted songwriting and complete musical mischief, two travelling raconteurs from opposite sides of the Atlantic will discover exactly what happens when you put two pianos into one tiny cellar and remove the rulebook.

JAZ DELOREAN + LOGAN METZ — THE "BAR-ROOM PIANO BRAWL" TOUR

Barnoldswick Music & Arts Centre — January 2027

Two pianos. Two remarkable musical journeys. One vague but groovy plan.

This could be an absolute riot.