Ornithology Premiere: Andrew Bird arrangements
I am nowhere nearly as hip as anyone else associated with wild Up, including the guy who tends the bar. So when Chris contacted me about orchestrating some Andrew Bird songs I had to take an auditory crash-course through the artist’s body of work. Fortunately, being a fan of acoustic indy pop in the Elliot Smith tradition and self-overdubbing madmen like Jon Brion,
Ornithology Premieres: Fake Palindromes
“Fake Palindromes” is the first song I ever heard by Andrew Bird, and it is my mind’s aural portrait of him. The title’s reference to palindromes calls to mind one of Messiaen’s trademarks: the “non-retrogradeable rhythm”, or a rhythmic palindrome. With the inclusion of Bird’s music on this wild Up concert featuring Messiaen’s Oiseaux exotiques [Foreign Birds], I knew I had to arrange this particular