By: David Schultz

A night removed from the elegant but more bohemian confines of Brooklyn’s Music Hall of Williamsburg, quirky songsmith Andrew Bird’s practice, practice, practice paid off and the Chicago native found himself center stage at Carnegie Hall. Striding alone onto the stage, Bird indulged every violinist’s fancy and filled the austere confines of the hall with his own playing. After paying proper respect to the storied venue, Bird removed the coverings that served as faux shoes, brought out his band, which included Martin Dosh, and played the rest of the night in his stocking feet.

Bird’s devoted the majority of his Carnegie Hall appearance to songs from his latest album Noble Beast, the title of which, the affable singer revealed, should be pronounced with proper David Attenborough inflections. Making use of a violin, xylophone, a looping machine and a marvelous ability to whistle, Bird makes fantastic music out of the instruments most people abandon after elementary school. When he shuns convention and plays the violin ukulele style, as on “Imitosis,” he sprinkles the delicate sounds into the music akin to Jerry Garcia.

Carrying on in the same vein as his 2007 album Armchair Apocrypha, Bird fills his songs with cryptic, higher education based imagery and a glut of multisyllabic words. The complex songs aren’t indicative of Bird’s psyche. On stage, he’s a relaxed and engaging showman. On idiosyncratic yet elegant songs like “Oh No,” Bird shook his head back and forth with cocksure Beatlemania relish while his lower body bounced in jittery Elvis Costello like contortions. His strength is his supreme mastery of composition. The only slow spot of the night was when he moved the set away from his own brainchilds in favor of Dosh’s “Not A Robot, But A Ghost” the dreamy electronica no equal to Bird’s erudite pop.

For the encore, Bird truly opened up. Returning by his lonesome, he slipped into pure Lyle Lovett mode for “Why?” easing through the song’s spoken breaks with a facile dexterity. Showing off Carnegie Hall’s marvelous acoustics, Bird unplugged his violin for a run through “Some Of These Days,” ostensibly ending the night, With the second encore bringing the impatient rushing back into the hall, Bird closed out the show with a speedy and potent run through “Fake Palindromes,” causing a raucous unsophisticated final burst from the crowd.

For a hallowed and revered a locale, there’s something about Carnegie Hall that brings out one’s inner impish troublemaker. As I sat in one of the comfortable balcony enclosures with my shoes surreptitiously removed and tucked under the chair in front of me, I couldn’t help but feel a kinship with Bird, who likewise felt the need to shed his restrictive footwear. After all, who wants to come to Carnegie Hall if you have to act like an adult?

Labels: Andrew Bird