Doors: 6:30 PM
Showtime: 7:30 PM
Andrew Bird is an internationally acclaimed, Grammy-nominated multi-instrumentalist, vocalist, whistler, and songwriter who picked up his first violin at the age of four and spent his formative years soaking up classical repertoire completely by ear. Since beginning his recording career in 1997, Bird has released 17 albums and performed extensively across the globe. He has recorded with the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, appeared as “Dr. Stringz” on Jack’s Big Music Show, and headlined concerts at Carnegie Hall, Sydney Opera House, Walt Disney Concert Hall, Red Rocks Amphitheatre, and festivals worldwide.
Bird performed as the Whistling Caruso in Disney’s The Muppets movie, scored the FX series Baskets, and collaborated with inventor Ian Schneller on Sonic Arboretum, an installation that exhibited at New York’s Guggenheim Museum, Boston’s ICA, and the MCA Chicago. Bird has been a featured TED Talks presenter, a New Yorker Festival guest, and an op-ed contributor for the New York Times.
More recently, Bird released a series of site-specific improvisational short films and recordings called Echolocations, recorded in remote and acoustically interesting spaces: a Utah canyon, an abandoned seaside bunker, the middle of the Los Angeles River, and a reverberant stone-covered aqueduct in Lisbon. Additionally, Bird hosts an ongoing series of live-streamed performances called Live from the Great Room, putting the creative process on display for fans as he collaborates and converses with friends in a candid, intimate setting.
Shortly after receiving his 2020 Grammy nomination for Best Folk Album, with My Finest Work Yet, Andrew Bird made his professional acting debut in the cast of Fargo’s fourth installment, which concluded on FX in November 2020 and is currently streaming via Hulu. In June 2022, Bird released his latest album, Inside Problems, on Loma Vista Recordings.
Uwade
You’ve heard Uwade before. It’s her honeyed voice that opens Fleet Foxes’ 2020 record Shore — an experience that’s since earned her global critical acclaim. Though her career in music is now taking off, for Uwade, 21, singing has always been a kind of prayer. This stems, in part, from her spiritual upbringing — steeped in the sounds of hymnal choral music and Nigerian Highlife on her dad’s car radio — and her rigorous education. A scholar of the highest order, Uwade has studied Classics at Columbia and Oxford, and cites Catullus and Virgil among her influences (along with Julian Casablancas and Nina Simone). Knowing this, it’s easy to want to plumb the academic depths of her sound. To describe her voice as a divine signal you’d read about in classic texts, at once ancient and altogether new.
But this feels heavy. And the truth is that Uwade’s voice is an embodiment of light. Yes, there is hope and influence and complexity there, but in the end, there’s just joy. The joy of following a feeling. Of being lost in the pleasure of the present moment. Of singing together with people in a room. Uwade’s latest single “The Man Who Sees Tomorrow’ could stand as a balm to our present time, an ode to hope in the midst of unbearable loss: “And even though my memories are fading far too fast / One day I will know it all / And frolic in the grass.”