On the night before your Thanksgiving feast, feast your ears!

Fiery chops, instinctual communal listening skills, sprawling musical vocabulary, dynamics in flight -- that's How Birds Work. On their CD "Live at the Artists' Quarter," HBW go from hard bop explorations to fusion-istic workouts to elegant melodicism on tracks like Coltrane's "Equinox," Wayne Shorter's "Footprints," and Peter Schimke's moving original "Vow." A recent Mpls/St. Paul magazine feature article described the sound as "swinging with lovely aggression -- and never swirling among the musicians for their own benefit, but constantly heading straight toward audience." Dean Granros (guitar), Peter Schimke (keyboards), Chris Bates (bass), Kenny Horst (drums).