PRICE:
$14.00
NOT IN STOCK
ARTIST
TITLE
Bird Show Band
FORMAT
CD

LABEL
CATALOG #
AMI 041CD AMI 041CD
GENRE
RELEASE DATE
1/18/2010

"Bird Show Band documents Bird Show's new collaborative spirit and stands as the culmination of Ben Vida's Chicago-based work, featuring a who's who of the city's improvisational luminaries, including Josh Abrams, Jim Baker, Dan Bitney and John Herndon. The improvisatory feel of the Bird Show Band sessions function as Vida's paean to the Windy City. Rather than another Bird Show release that involves guest accompaniment on select tracks, Vida conceived of these recordings as a foray into session playing, tracking the entire album over just two days. While Herndon and Bitney's percussion invokes German psych, progressive rock, and jazz idioms, Vida's synth-based experiments, here accompanied by Jim Baker's ARP 2600, provide the first indication of his recent musical preoccupations, an interest that relies heavily on the Moog and his own fluid, lyrical melodic lines. If you have had the luck of catching Bird Show or Ben Vida perform live over the last few years, you have witnessed the centrality he now gives to the Moog and one-touch patchwork, experimental forays that point to Europe and the mid-century avant-garde, especially the Cologne-based innovations of Stockhausen and his many students during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Regardless of this description, Bird Show Band is more than a mere intellectual exercise and the sessions balance brain with musical brawn in ways that Vida has yet to achieve on his previous outings."