There's a common phenomenon in American music where a musician who wants to be taken seriously as an artist feels duty bound to make an album devoted to the Great American Songbook.
Andrew Bird's body of work has been artful and celebrated enough that you'd think he'd be immune to this sort of thinking, but 2024's
Sunday Morning Put-On shows he's decided to give it a try anyway. Featuring nine covers and one original,
Sunday Morning Put-On finds
Bird making a straightforward jazz album, or at least his version of a straightforward jazz album. Here, he's backed by an acoustic rhythm section,
Alan Hampton on bass and
Ted Poor on drums, and the performances were cut live to tape in a vintage recording studio. The strategy was to create an intimate atmosphere that best serves the nuances of the performances, and it succeeds quite well.
Hampton and
Poor are unobtrusive while adding plenty of shade and color to the performances, and
Bird's violin work is superb, coaxing an evocative tone that moves past the traditional approach to the instrument. He gives it a dark, smoky voice that beautifully complements the sweet sadness of his vocals, which suggest he's been listening to a lot of great jazz vocalists and learning from the experience. Clearly
Bird chose to take on an album of standards because this music is the bedrock of a particular form of jazz, and if he bends the tunes to his own needs, he does so with respect, and he's capable of performing "I Cover the Waterfront," "You'd Be So Nice to Come Home To," and "Caravan" while sounding like he was born to do this. Most rock musicians who attempt to approach jazz on its own terms sound like dilettantes, but
Bird's repertoire has taken him in enough directions that he clearly understands the role of the interpretive musician as well as finding something of his own within this music, and if his approach to these songs is hardly radical, he understands their beauty and finds his own way of bringing it out. For the finale,
Bird unveils "Ballon de Peut-Etre," a nine-minute instrumental piece that recalls a very different story of jazz; it's the sort of extended piece that walks the middle ground between the adventure of be-bop and the feel of cool jazz of the '50s. If it stands out from the other tracks, it shows
Bird is in touch with the improvisational heart of post-war jazz, and it's a bold but satisfying conclusion to an LP that reminds us just how quietly brilliant
Andrew Bird can be. ~ Mark Deming
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