With Birdsong, Champian Fulton not only pays tribute to the mammoth musician who has played such an integral role in her life as an artist, but also hopes to expose the music of Charlie Parker to new audiences and prove that even on the eve of his centennial, Bird truly is timeless.

The New York Times calls BIRDSONG "buoyant!"

THE LINER NOTES:
Before Champian Fulton made her debut—not her jazz debut, but her “Congratulations, it’s a girl!” debut—her father, Stephen ( whose swinging, affable flugelhorn can be heard over the course of this record), decided he wanted his child to be born into the world hearing the most beautiful music there was. For him, that was Charlie Parker with Strings, the sessions on which producer Norman Granz granted Bird’s longtime wish to record with an orchestra. He made a cassette of the music and played it for his wife Susan during her pregnancy. And it was that cassette that was playing when Champian was first put into her mother’s arms.

So Birdsong has been gestating for as many years as Champian has been alive. And there are reasons, apart from that fact that it accompanied her entrance into the world, that she holds Bird’s music so close. Champian hails from the southwest (Norman, Oklahoma to be exact), and she feels an affinity with Parker and Count Basie and Coleman Hawkins and other jazz artists from that section of the country. That intangible something, she says, had to do with a commitment to swing, an approach to the music that’s joyful and instinctual rather than intellectualized.

I’m not fool enough to even try to address the stylistic innovations of Charlie Parker or the technical means by which Champian and her quartet – Fukushi Tainaka on drums, Hide Tanaka on bass, Scott Hamilton on sax, and dad Stephen on flugelhorn--translate those innovations in their own versions. All I can say is that when I listen to Parker, the tragic facts of his life fall away, as does the figure of the fetishized hipster saint. What stays is this: the joy of an artist so confident in the innovations he’s discovering that his speed can feel like the ease of a man taking a Sunday stroll.

It’s fitting, then, that Champian has made her most playful album. It’s not uncommon, at a club date in the middle of a piano solo, to see Champian hit on the right and unexpected combination of chords and react with a big smile and a sudden “Ha!” She shows that same delight in discovering all that her voice can do. She’s at the place in her singing where you can hear her going on instinct, not knowing where the next line will take her, but trusting she’ll land on solid ground. Listen to the opener “Just Friends.” Her voice might suddenly dip low. She might clip off a word if she feels she’s made her point, or stretch out a phrase, allowing the final syllable to fade away much in the same way that another southwesterner, Ben Webster, allows the final breaths of a line to fade to a vibrating whisper. (That’s also a quality you can hear on Hamilton’s sax.) If you want to know how a caress would sound if it swung, listen to the opening lines of “Dearly Beloved.”

It’s fair to call Champian an essentially optimistic artist and thus, as was once said about the filmmaker Howard Hawks, we have to be careful of underrating her because we enjoy her. Listen to Birdsong and what you hear from her and her quartet is what Albert Murray once called “flexibility, the art of adapting, and the necessity for continuous creation in a perpetually oppressive and unstable world.” Which is a way of saying that Champian has paid tribute to the musician she listens to every day by making everything she sings of, the joys and sorrows, sweeter.
We should all have the grace to wear our influences so lightly.

-Charles Taylor