Concert review: Andrew Bird at the Civic Opera House
Tragedy struck Thursday in the first of two sold-out Andrew Bird concerts at the opulent Civic Opera House. Bird’s musical weapon of choice – his violin --- was mortally wounded when it slipped from his hands near the end of the show, crashed to the stage and cracked in two.
Bird soldiered on to the finish without his most trusted accomplice, but it did put a damper on the 100-minute homecoming performance. Once a quirky swing-jazz maverick, the lean, soft-spoken artist is selling out theaters around the country with a patchwork style that pieces together everything from Eastern European classical music to bluegrass. He’s still quirky, in other words, but now he’s really, really popular.
“How about this, huh,” he said as he gazed up at the packed balconies. “I always wanted to play here, but I never thought I could.”
His style is at once homespun and high-brow, as reflected by his attire: suit, tie and stocking feet. While Bird flitted among several instruments, including electric guitar and glockenspiel, he was most at home plucking or bowing his ill-fated violin, an instrument he has studied seriously since he was a child.
When he blasted away with considerably less nuance on guitar, he and his three accompanists sounded like just another boisterous garage-rock band, perfectly bland. But when caressing his violin and puckering up for a whistle solo, he sounds unlike anything in the indie-pop world.
On record, Bird holds his listeners at arm’s length. He makes exquisitely remote music, full of oblique multisyllabic words and entrancing sounds that sometimes feel cut-and-pasted together. But seeing Bird perform adds another dimension to his technical expertise. From the opening “Dark Matter,” he was immersed in the moment, his eyes closed, his head bobbing and swaying as he built layer upon layer of sound and then electronically orchestrated the swirl of wordless harmonies, whistled melodies, swooning violins and chiming glockenspiel into a one-man mini-symphony.
There were the usual awkward juxtapositions, the sense that Bird still doesn’t quite know how to say “enough” when arranging a song. The meditative intro to “Mastersworm” felt gratuitous, especially once the band picked up a hand-clap groove that obliterated the recorded version in terms of urgency. Bird’s violin seductively slipped in and out of the rhythm, setting up a knee-buckling whistle solo. There was plenty of beauty in “A Nervous Tic Motion of the Head to the Left,” where he fiddled and whistled in call-and-response over a motoring groove. And “Oh, No” was among Bird’s simplest songs, reveling in an amiable rhythm and a rare refrain, which he enunciated as a sob, a moan and then a high, warbling sigh.
When the violin called it a night, Bird played two Handsome Family songs: the set-closing “The Giant of Illinois” and the final encore, “Don’t Be Scared.” The latter is a sad song of reassurance, a perfect choice for a promising evening that ended in splinters.
greg@gregkot.com