Magnificent Bird Gabriel Kahane

• 1 We are the Saints 03:15
• 2 Hot Pink Raingear 02:22
• 3 The Hazelnut Tree 02:20
• 4 To Be American 02:57
• 5 Chemex 02:23
• 6 Linda & Stuart 02:38
• 7 Magnificent Bird 02:41
• 8 The Basement Engineer 01:47
• 9 Die Traumdeutung 03:53
• 10 Sit Shiva 03:21
• Total Runtime 27:37

Info for Magnificent Bird

On his new album, Gabriel Kahane chronicles the final month of a year spent off the internet. Shuttling between the quotidian mundane and a series of overlapping global crises, he sings of grief, nostalgia, shame, and salvation: a portrait of daily life in the roiling chaos of the 21st century.

The dozen collaborators who appear on Magnificent Bird—a list that also includes composer/performers Nathalie Joachim and Pekka Kuusisto; the celebrated clarinetist Anthony McGill; avant-folk stalwarts Sam Amidon and Holcombe Waller; longtime colleagues Gabriel Cabezas, Casey Foubert, Alex Sopp, and Elizabeth Ziman; and mix engineer Joseph Lorge—reflect a central paradox: a trunk of songs written in self-imposed isolation was brought to life through the very technology Kahane had shunned. “Everyone who plays on the album is someone I love as a person as much as I do as a musician. The truth is, after all that isolation, I just wanted an excuse to get in touch with my friends. It was almost secondary to get them to play on this record, which is, as much as any I’ve made, a pure expression of community.”

Gabriel Kahane lives in Portland, Oregon, where he serves as Creative Chair for the Oregon Symphony, for whom he composed, in 2018, emergency shelter intake form, an exploration of inequality through the lens of housing issues. This season, his piano concerto, Heirloom, was premiered by his father, Jeffrey Kahane, with the Kansas City Symphony; it will be heard again in Portland in March. Upcoming projects include an orchestral song cycle—for the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Cincinnati Symphony—further exploring his internet hiatus, surveillance capitalism, and the cascading consequences of our digital regime. The recipient of a 2021 Charles Ives Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Gabriel has collaborated with a wide array of artists ranging from Sufjan Stevens, Phoebe Bridgers, Blake Mills, and Paul Simon, to Brooklyn Rider, yMusic, and John Adams. He is a graduate of Brown University.

"A collection of sweet and intimate songs that have the immediacy of a pencil sketch and the depth of a mural." (NO DEPRESSION)

"A gorgeous, intimate collection of ten musical snapshots... Kahane’s lyrics sparkle with an incisive blend of sentiment and clarity, and he matches them with music that pushes more restlessly than ever against the constraints of the song form... the artwork that results is glistening and magical." (San Francisco Chronicle)

Gabriel Kahane, vocals, piano, synthesizers, acoustic and electric guitars, banjo, electric bass, drum programming
Chris Thile, mandolin
Andrew Bird, violin
Gabriel Cabezas, cello
Casey Foubert, acoustic and electric guitars, electric bass, drums, vibraphone
Nathalie Joachim, flutes
Alexandra Sopp, flutes, whistles, piccolo
Paul Kowert, upright bass
Pekka Kuusisto, violin
Joseph Lorge, synthesizers, drum programming, electric guitars
Anthony McGill, clarinet
Chris Morrissey, electric bass
Ted Poor, drums, percussion, piano
Sam Amidon, background vocals
Caroline Shaw, background vocals, violin
Holcombe Waller, background vocals
Elizabeth Ziman, background vocals
Amelia Meath, background vocals

Gabriel Kahane
Composer, pianist, and singer Gabriel Kahane makes his Nonesuch Records debut with the release of Book of Travelers on August 24, 2018; vinyl out September 7. The album comprises a musical travelogue Kahane wrote after the journey he embarked upon the day after the 2016 Presidential election: a looping, 8,980-mile railway journey through the United States. He left behind his cell phone and other internet-connected devices, spending the next two weeks with dozens of strangers whose stories are woven into the cycle. The music is drawn from a longer work that has been performed at Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), among other venues, as 8980: Book of Travelers, a production conceived in collaboration with director Daniel Fish and designer Jim Findlay (set and video design) with lighting by Mark Barton. Pre-order Book of Travelers to download the album track "November" now and get a limited-edition signed print.

Kahane wrote in the New York Times of his trip, which he planned before the election, and was going to take regardless of the outcome: "Where much of the digital world finds us sorting ourselves neatly into cultural and ideological silos, the train, in my experience, does precisely the opposite. It also acts, by some numinous, unseen force, as a kind of industrial-strength social lubricant. To be sure, I encountered people whose politics I found abhorrent, dangerous, and destructive, but in just about every instance, there was something about the person's relationship to family, and loyalty to family, that I found deeply moving. That ability to connect across an ideological divide seemed predicated on the fact that we were quite literally breaking bread together. Perhaps it also had something to do with the pace at which we traveled."

Singer-songwriter and composer Gabriel Kahane has recorded critically-acclaimed albums including The Ambassador (called "one of the year's best" by Rolling Stone); The Fiction Issue, an album of his chamber music with string quartet Brooklyn Rider; and Where Are the Arms. The staged version of The Ambassador, directed by Tony-winner John Tiffany, was presented by BAM, CAP UCLA, and Carolina Performing Arts.

As a composer of concert works, Kahane has been commissioned by Carnegie Hall, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Oregon Symphony, American Composers Orchestra, and Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, with whom he toured his WPA-inspired Gabriel's Guide to the 48 States in 2013. He has appeared as soloist with the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, Colorado Symphony, the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, and A Far Cry. An avid theater artist, Kahane's musical February House, with playwright Seth Bockley, premiered at the Public Theater in 2012 and was recorded by the StorySound label. A two-time MacDowell Colony fellow, Kahane has performed and/or recorded with artists ranging from Sufjan Stevens, Andrew Bird, Blake Mills, Chris Thile, and Brad Mehldau, to Jeremy Denk, yMusic, and John Adams. He is a graduate of Brown University and resides in Brooklyn.

This album contains no booklet.