Three of us began this work in a residency at Banlieus Bleus in Paris in 2018.

The idea was to base an improvising quartet’s music around the original birdsong transcriptions of Olivier Messiaen, before he worked them into his music. There are 1200 pages of these available in his Treatise on Rhythm, Color, and Ornithology, and many have the sketchy, suggestive quality of jazz charts. We set the material loose upon the group.

Back in Woodstock, a year and a half later, in 2019, we added Czech vocalist and violinist Iva Bittová to the mix, creating a most unusual quartet blending two folk traditions, improvisation from four artists all with some association with ECM Records, and particularly treated sounds of birds in a most unusual mix.

Everything was recorded on one long day in Nevessa Studios with engineer Chris Andersen, who has worked often with Crispell and Rothenberg.

The group then judiciously mixed and sequenced the material over the following years, coming up with this carefully selected blend of quartets, trios, and duos.

The album will be packaged with a series of photos by Ingo J. Biermann, veteran of many ECM studio shoots, and should come out in the Fall of 2025.
credits
released July 29, 2025