The Little Bird

In the current landscape of young French jazz, Pj5 offers one of the most pertinent musical propositions. This is a group in the full meaning of the term, whose identity comes above all from a sound: a certain capacity to densify the derivative sound of death metal, with the shapes of contemplative contemporary chamber music, the borders of minimalism and folk, fuelled with their personal contemporary jazz sensibility and improvisations. A laureate of the ‘Jazz Migration’ program for upcoming talents, composed of five French musicians from the same generation, Pj5 releases a third album displaying a band striving for purity and nuance, energy and intensity in order to accomplish a music capable of moving from epic accents to the simplicity of jingles, from electric storms to delicate sound patterns.

An excellent album, The Serfs were usually billing themselves as Mike Finnigan and The Serfs by the time this was released. Really an R&B/Jazz/Funk album. Two of the tracks on this album were later re-recorded for The Jerry Hahn Brotherhood LP: Early Bird Cafe and Time's Caught Up With You.

Why aren't there more recordings like Fly Away Little Bird? Perhaps it's because there aren't more musicians of this stature. The studio reunion of the legendarily experimental Jimmy Giuffre 3 in 1992 was reissued in 2002 on the French Sunnyside label and is a radical departure from anything the trio had done in the past. These studio apparitions of the band are their most seamlessly accessible while being wildly exploratory. In addition to the consummate improvisations and compositions by Giuffre (title track, a redone "Tumbleweed"), the tender meditations by Steve Swallow ("Fits" and "Starts"), and the bottom-register contrapuntal improves by Paul Bley ("Qualude"), this is a trio recording that uses standards such as "Lover Man," a radically and gorgeously reworked "I Can't Get Started," "Sweet and Lovely," and "All the Things You Are" to state hidden textural possibilities inside chromatic harmony. There is never the notion of restraint in the slow, easy, and proactive way these compositions are approached.