"Recorded at Brooklyn's BRIC House, The Brown Beatnik Tomes features bassist Ron Carter collaborating with poet and painter Danny Simmons in a live concert setting, transforming works from Simmons' book Brown Beatnik Tomes into a stirring multimedia performance experience. The poems represent Simmons' inspiration to update the style and voice of iconic beat authors like Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Jack Kerouac, and Allen Ginsberg, but from a contemporary African-American perspective. In keeping with the coffeehouse style of the original beatniks, these are intimate acoustic performances in which Simmons delivers his literate, evocative spoken-word poems as Carter offers sympathetic walking bassline accents and bluesy grooves"