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<\/figure>\n\n\n\nTherefore, it is difficult (if not impossible) to capture the excitement I felt watching Bird perform in front of a sold out \u2013 if still quite small \u2013 crowd at Chicago\u2019s august jazz club The Green Mill.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Principally performing selections from \u2018Sunday Morning Put-On,\u2019 his new album of small-combo jazz standards and compositions, Bird was as loose and virtuosic as any long-time fan would expect \u2013 indeed, music to him seems as natural an action as breathing \u2013 but there were two critical differences between Wednesday night\u2019s performance and Bird\u2019s recent work:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Firstly, there is the genre of the music itself; not since 1998\u2019s \u2018Thrills\u2019 and 2000\u2019s \u2018Oh! The Grandeur\u2019 has Bird committed himself to a jazz project, but even those comparisons are a stretch \u2013 those albums are delightfully bizarre jazz freak outs, the love child of St\u00e9phane Grappelli and Tom Waits (case in point, the eugenics-meets-cannibals track \u201cEugene\u201d). \u2018Sunday Morning,\u2019 by contrast, plays it straight, albeit with Bird\u2019s adventurous violin more Coltrane than Grappelli as it wove around the phenomenal rhythm section of Ted Poor (drums) and Alan Hampton (bass).\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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 \u2013 \u201cI felt like it, and I love the music\u201d \u2013 and indeed, his affection for the genre could not have been more apparent in the songs\u2019 arrangements. Like the finest musicians before him, Bird understands that jazz works best when there is\u00a0space<\/em>. It\u2019s one thing for Miles Davis to solo at The Blackhawk in San Francisco \u2013 it\u2019s an entirely different matter to do so in a manner that allows Wynton Kelly\u2019s piano, Paul Chambers\u2019 bass, and Jimmy Cobb\u2019s drums to also shine. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Such was the camaraderie and respect of Bird\u2019s 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 \u201cWhy\u201d (a 2001 track that used to be a concert standard) to a standout reinvention of 2019\u2019s \u201cBloodless.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n Across his now-three-decade career, Bird has never been short on surprises, but behind those adventures and reinventions has been an inherent respect \u2013 stick with me, he seems to be saying, and you\u2019ll 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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 \u2013 how riveting it […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":54649,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[41,39,20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-54648","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-features","category-music-news","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/beintheloopchicago.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54648","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/beintheloopchicago.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/beintheloopchicago.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beintheloopchicago.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beintheloopchicago.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=54648"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/beintheloopchicago.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54648\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beintheloopchicago.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/54649"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/beintheloopchicago.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=54648"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beintheloopchicago.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=54648"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beintheloopchicago.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=54648"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"http:\/\/beintheloopchicago.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/05\/Andrew-Bird-Trio-Green-Mill-Chicago-2024-33-1024x683.jpg\")
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