Bird tells tales with a variety of instruments

By Jordan Sargent

Published April 24, 2007

Andrew Bird is a troubadour and staying true to form, the violin/whistling whiz's show Sunday at The Blue Note was framed by his inherent, if not nurtured, kookiness.

The music of the Chicago-based Bird has, at the very least, a hint of playfulness and whimsicality that manifested itself on stage during in-between song banter. A guy like Bird has stories to tell, as all musicians should, and Bird told of chicken coops and raccoons (for more, see his recent Rolling Stone feature) during his "eco-friendly" tour while introducing "Tables and Chairs" and a sock monkey that was dressed in a suit and carrying an actual mini-violin.

The personality he constructed for himself on stage is that of someone purposefully aloof and nonsensical — something like the forgetful Professor Plum from the "Clue" book series. Whether all this was cultivated or real was a little hard to tell, but nonetheless, it was endearing insomuch that the 37-year-old Bird was almost like a kooky storyteller at a medieval festival and the crowd, most of which were half his age, the rapturous grade-school audience.

Bird furthered his on-stage image by bringing this personality into his music in the form of sighs, chuckles, long pauses, asides and other things of that sort. It was fine and all, but at times it hampered the performance. I never imagined that I was going to wish Bird would just shut up and play, but at many points in his performance, I wished that he would just, you know, shut up and play.

His stage character basically massacred his far-and-away best song, "Fake Palindromes," with a way, way over-the-top, near-stand-up routine. Bird pre-empted the song by saying he and his band hadn't played it in a while. At first it felt special, but it also gave Bird the license to pretend to flub the words, which would have been funny had it not been this song and not this drawn-out.

Many of Bird's songs just bounce along at his leisure, flipping rhyme sequence and song structure, but "Fake Palindromes" is a straight-ahead rocker built upon jagged, slicing violin lines. On the song, Bird shows off his innate and incredible sense of how to build and then smash your head with a climax, but on Sunday night, the song just meandered and floundered. By the time the final violin refrain came through clear over the overbearing guitar and samples, it was a two-second hit of crack. Thanks dude, but we'll take the whole rock next time.

Bird culled nearly all of the show's material from his past two records, Mysterious Production of Eggs and Armchair Apocrypha, and much to my own surprise, it was the latter's material that came off the best. The chorus of "Plasticities" was heart-racing while the extended outro was as sublime as sublime comes, and the performances of "Heretics" and "Fiery Crash" were that of a masterful indie-rock band.

In my review of Apocrypha, I called Bird a "virtuoso," and he wore the term well, but it was his longtime tour-mate and drummer Martin Dosh that was MVP of the show (blasphemy, I know). Set off stage right, Dosh took Bird's violin strums and plucks and looped them so Bird could play another instrument while still integrating the sound he recorded for the loop.

As you might have surmised, the show was a mini-production within itself. If you've ever read or heard about Bird's show, you know that much is made of his frantic working of various instruments and pedals, and Sunday night saw him switching from guitar to violin frenetically and to xylophone smoothly. It was a fine display of technical prowess — dude does have a "violin degree" from Northwestern University, mind you — but I enjoyed the performance more with my eyes closed, when I could sway and let the music wash over me.

Bird's music makes itself on intimacy between listener and singer, and staring blankly at Bird in the cavernous Blue Note betrayed that idea. Closed eyes brought back that necessary intimacy and were therefore more rewarding.

There's a line in "Heretics" that goes "It's not all that bad, are we not having fun?" and Sunday night Bird predictably annunciated it with a wink and a smirk. Of course he knew what the answer was.