David Murray, the Promethean tenor saxophonist and bass clarinetist, had flight and feathers on his mind as he created the music on Birdly Serenade. Due out on Impulse! Records on April 25, it will be the first Murray album on a major label since the early 1990s, when his DIW albums had distribution through Columbia. And it foregrounds a creative collaboration that has long fluttered behind the scenes in Murray’s life and art.
The album’s title track illuminates that story. A polyrhythmic waltz with a yearning melody, it features lyrics adapted from a poem by Murray’s wife and manager, Francesca Cinelli. They are sung by the dynamic young Cameroonian-American jazz singer Ekep Nkwelle, with strong and sensitive support from the David Murray Quartet. WRTI is proud to present the world premiere of the song, “Birdly Serenade,” with session footage from the historic Van Gelder Studio in Englewood Cliffs, N.J.
“A hazy silence / Caresses the peaceful waters / Of the sleepy lake” sings Nkwele in its first verse, conjuring an idyllic image with specific origins. Cinelli, a fashion designer and writer, was invited to an artist retreat on Blue Mountain Lake in the Adirondacks. Murray had been planning to simply tag along until he received an invitation from the music supervisor Randall Poster, co-creator of The Birdsong Project, an initiative to protect wild birdlife, which won a 2024 Grammy for its 20-LP boxed set, For the Birds.
“So we were like, ‘Wow, this is perfect,’” Murray, who turned 70 last month, tells WRTI. “Because otherwise I really didn’t have anything to do but just kind of watch other people create. Randall gave me a lot of freedom with the concept.” With help from the staff at the retreat, Murray set up a bird feeder borrowed from his sister-in-law, though the encroaching winter cold meant that it didn’t attract many visitors.
What ended up providing a creative spark instead were the poems written by Cinelli, who had arrived at the retreat heavy with sadness over her ailing mother. “Birdly Serenade” was the first thing she wrote — a precise, poetic record of what she observed, including the “the tremolos of a diving bird” as it breaks through the mist, “to the dancing feast / of the swirling minnows.”
Murray’s melodic setting to this verse proves an ideal fit for his quartet, which features musicians in their late 30s and early 40s: pianist Marta Sánchez, bassist Luke Stewart and drummer Russell Carter. This lineup has been working steadily for a few years; its studio album Francesca, on the Swiss label Intakt, was named one of the best jazz albums of 2024 by a number of critics, notably at the New York Times.
“There’s nothing like a working band,” Murray affirms. “It’s always good to have some tours — getting on and off of planes and trains, kind of living together and traveling together, and getting to the point where you’re just not just playing the notes on the page. The song becomes the band, the band becomes the song, and the song actually teaches you how to play it.”
The new album includes songs both tender and turbulent; among the latter are “Black Bird’s Gonna Lite Up the Night,” which Murray wrote in the studio during the recording session, and “Capistrano Swallow,” which draws from his youthful memories of the famous springtime swarm at the Mission San Juan Capistrano in Southern California. Along with “Birdly Serenade,” Murray incorporated Cinelli’s poetry on “Song of the World (For Mixashawn Rozie)” and “Oiseau de Paradis,” on which she offers a spoken-word performance.
“I don’t necessarily have to play standards anymore,” reflects Murray. “I’m trying to make my own standards. That’s part of the reason I write songs — to create my own world of music. This project helped me to do that, in a big way.”
The David Murray Quartet appears at the Blue Note Jazz Club in New York on March 31 and April 14. Birdly Serenade will be released on Impulse! Records on April 25.
