Prolific musician Andrew Bird has unveiled a trio featuring Ted Poor and Alan Hampton, with whom he's releasing a new album paying tribute to mid-century, small group jazz and the Great American Songbook.
Sunday Morning Put-On arrives May 24 through Loma Vista Recordings. It follows Bird's most recent solo album, last year's Outside Problems, and sees him deliver his own spin on standards by Cole Porter and Duke Ellington, as well as Lerner and Loewe, Rodgers and Hart, and more. He produced the record, recorded completely live, in Southern California's legendary Valentine Studios.
"When I was in my 20s, I lived in an old apartment-hotel in the Edgewater neighbourhood of Chicago. It was cheap and inhabited mostly by retired Jesuit priests and nuns from nearby Loyola University," Bird explained in a release. "Most Saturday nights I'd stay up listening to a radio show called Blues Before Sunrise on WBEZ from 12–4 a.m. The DJ, Steve Cushing, played old rare 78rpm records of blues, jazz and gospel."
He continued, "Then I'd sleep for a few hours and wake to Dick Buckley's show, also on WBEZ, featuring what he called Golden Era jazz from the '30s and '40s. My love for a certain era of jazz up through the mid-20th century has been constant through many transmutations in my own work, the bulk of which is not jazz at all. Once I had some distance between myself and this time when I was under its spell, I wanted to immerse myself in it again."
Listen to the artist's renditions of "I Fall in Love Too Easily" (Sammy Cahn-Jule Styne) and "I've Grown Accustomed to Her Face" (Alan Jay Lerner-Frederick Loewe) below, where you'll also find the full album tracklist.
Sunday Morning Put-On:
1. I Didn't Know What Time It Was
2. Caravan
3. I Fall in Love Too Easily
4. You'd Be So Nice to Come Home To
5. My Ideal
6. Django
7. I Cover the Waterfront
8. Softly, as a Morning Sunrise
9. I've Grown Accustomed to Her Face
10. Ballon de Peut-etre