“The snake is gonna bite. The tiger’s gonna pounce. The bird’s gonna sing.”

A prominent figure in New York’s legendary free jazz loft scene, David Murray arrived in the city in 1975 at just 20-years-old, and was almost immediately taken under the wing of avant-garde jazz drummer Sunny Murray (no relation). Sunny would introduce the young David to the music of Albert Ayler, who had tragically passed away a few years before, and in a sense, pass the torch from one great tenor saxophonist to the next. The introduction would lead directly to Murray’s 1976 debut album on India Navigation, Flowers For Albert, which was conceived after a melodic line suddenly came to Murray while he was walking past the East River where Ayler’s body was found…

Murray would go on to have a prolific career, recording on hundreds of albums with legends including Jack DeJohnette, Wadada Leo Smith, Milford Graves, Max Roach, Randy Weston, Pharoah Sanders, McCoy Tyner, Taj Mahal, Mal Waldron, Don Pullen, Amiri Baraka, Jerry Garcia, among others, as well as leading numerous projects as a bandleader (be sure to check his World Saxophone Quartet).

Fast forward to present times, Murray received an invitation from music supervisor Randall Poster to record some music for The Birdsong Project, an initiative to protect wild birdlife which won a 2024 Grammy for its beautiful 127-song set, For the Birds. Murray’s contribution to the project, Birdly Serenade, is out April 25th on Impulse! and features new compositions inspired by “the tremolos of a diving bird… to the dancing feast of the swirling minnows.” Recorded at the legendary Van Gelder Studio, the album 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 support from the David Murray Quartet.

From the album’s liner notes:

“Innovator Eric Dolphy learned firsthand the relevance of birdsong to improvisation: speaking with John Coltrane and writer Don DeMicheal in the April 12, 1962 issue of Downbeat, he confided that imitating birds was part of his development. ‘At home [in California] I used to play, and the birds always used to whistle with me. I would stop what I was working on and play with the birds.’ They pushed Dolphy to discover quarter-tones on the flute: ‘Birds have notes in between our notes’.

David Murray hears it, and plays it, in a similar way. ‘A whole world is up there if you can find how to get to it,’ he says. And if Murray, unlike Dolphy, never practiced alongside birds growing up in the Bay Area, early study of flute and piccolo attuned him to the upper registers of what would become his signature horns, tenor saxophone and bass clarinet. Murray feels Sun Ra was right to conduct on his own terms the search for a “universal language”: as the Arkestra’s bandleader said in the 1980 documentary A Joyful Noise, ‘I’m just like the birds, they sing. Those who like, can listen.’ For Murray, that statement
retains a political edge, Sun Ra’s other-worldliness notwithstanding. Nature shows us the way. ‘The
snake is gonna bite. The tiger’s gonna pounce. The bird’s gonna sing.'”

Read more about The Birdsong Project: https://www.thebirdsongproject.com/

Pre-Save/Pre-Order Birdly Serenade: https://davidmurrayquartet.lnk.to/BirdlySerenade