Chicago’s Own, Andrew Bird, Returns For An Intimate Two Show Night At Uptown’s Green Mill As Jazz Trio

May 30, 2024 admin_bitlc Features, Music News, Reviews 0

By Peter Thomas Ricci

When I first began seriously listening to Andrew Bird in 2010-11, a distinct air of mystery surrounded the multi-hyphenated violinists early-career concerts – how riveting it must have been, I imagined, to have seen Bird perform in small venues like The Hideout! Stuck, as I was, watching the by-then-hugely-popular musician as such venues as The Auditorium Theatre, it was damn near impossible to not romanticize the intimacy of those early shows.

Therefore, it is difficult (if not impossible) to capture the excitement I felt watching Bird perform in front of a sold out – if still quite small – crowd at Chicago’s august jazz club The Green Mill.

Principally performing selections from ‘Sunday Morning Put-On,’ his new album of small-combo jazz standards and compositions, Bird was as loose and virtuosic as any long-time fan would expect – indeed, music to him seems as natural an action as breathing – but there were two critical differences between Wednesday night’s performance and Bird’s recent work:

Firstly, there is the genre of the music itself; not since 1998’s ‘Thrills’ and 2000’s ‘Oh! The Grandeur’ has Bird committed himself to a jazz project, but even those comparisons are a stretch – those albums are delightfully bizarre jazz freak outs, the love child of Stéphane Grappelli and Tom Waits (case in point, the eugenics-meets-cannibals track “Eugene”). ‘Sunday Morning,’ by contrast, plays it straight, albeit with Bird’s adventurous violin more Coltrane than Grappelli as it wove around the phenomenal rhythm section of Ted Poor (drums) and Alan Hampton (bass).

Second, there is the nature of that jazz. During an gap between songs, Bird admitted to the audience that he reason for the recording the tracks was a simple one – “I felt like it, and I love the music” – and indeed, his affection for the genre could not have been more apparent in the songs’ arrangements. Like the finest musicians before him, Bird understands that jazz works best when there is space. It’s one thing for Miles Davis to solo at The Blackhawk in San Francisco – it’s an entirely different matter to do so in a manner that allows Wynton Kelly’s piano, Paul Chambers’ bass, and Jimmy Cobb’s drums to also shine.

Such was the camaraderie and respect of Bird’s Green Mill concert, and it was downright exciting to not only watch the songs unfold, but to also see the same connection among my fellow concertgoers. And of course, there were the older tracks that Bird revisited in his present musical context, from “Why” (a 2001 track that used to be a concert standard) to a standout reinvention of 2019’s “Bloodless.”

Across his now-three-decade career, Bird has never been short on surprises, but behind those adventures and reinventions has been an inherent respect – stick with me, he seems to be saying, and you’ll be rewarded. Watching Bird at the Green Mill felt like a culmination of all those years of careful listening and watching, and it left me only more excited to see where he goes next.