birdland film
The film Birdland is a visual musical score for trumpet and double bass. Shown here in silence, the images slowly shift through a catalogue of NASA photos, desserts, floods, ruins, bird eggs and sonograms.
Above is a short recording of the first performance in France. Recorded for the finissage of a project with Echanger 22 in the Priory Saint-Esprit in June 2023.
I wanted to give the viewer a sense of travel above the earth and a sense of what a bird must fly over in order to reach us. I also wanted it to be dream like , real and yet unreal. The slow movement came through working with Jim Howard and recognising the tempo that the images needed to have in order for him to improvise for it. One of my inspirations for this work was Chris markers film La Jété 1962 which uses still images to tell a story. The Nasa photos were from the migratory routes across the Sahel, Sahara and the Mediterranean.
Originally made for the Musee des Alpilles in 2023 it has been used multiple times for improvisations.