There was some visible jaw dropping in the audience when Rudresh Mahanthappa‘s band blasted their first notes at the Winter Jazzfest in January. The quintet came out charging, its fractured spin on Charlie Parker’s songbook teeming with the ardor that has come to define the saxophonist’s work. The new Bird Calls catches all this fierceness. Mahanthappa has crafted original tunes inspired by a signature phrase or thematic element in the Parker canon, and his squad breaks them apart and glues them back together with a maniacal glee. In a modern tongue, they sustain all the joy and physicality that helped define bebop’s beginnings.
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