Bird Show Band

***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 pre-occupations, an interest that relies heavily on the Moog and his own fluid, lyrical melodic lines. (STREET DATE - 1/26/2010)