Today, we're putting The Tonearm's needle on the Montreal jazz collective Bellbird.
Bellbird formed during pandemic park jams and has since become one of the more compelling voices in Canada's avant-garde jazz scene. The quartet consists of Claire Devlin on tenor sax, Allison Burik on alto sax and bass clarinet, Eli Davidovici on bass, and Mili Hong on drums. No guitar, no piano, just three mostly single-note instruments and a drum kit, which turns out to be more than enough. Their debut, Root in Tandem, earned serious praise. Their second album, The Call, came out on February 6th on Constellation Records. It was built from bird sound transcriptions, Mary Oliver poems, and sessions in the countryside, and it doesn't sound like anything else on that storied label's roster.
Two members of the collective, Claire Devlin and Eli Davidovici, are here to take us through the story.
(The musical excerpts heard in the interview are from Bellbird's album The Call)
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