With their debut project Sunday Morning Put-On, the Andrew Bird Trio takes a trip through time. Re-immersed in a longtime love of mid-century small-group jazz music, Andrew Bird breathes new life into a collection of songs he first started performing at Chicago clubs in his teens and 20s, discovered during late-night and sunrise broadcasts on the local radio station. In the decades since, the formative work of Cole Porter, Duke Ellington, Lerner & Loewe, Rodgers & Hart, and other “Golden Era” songwriting titans has not only been etched into the “Great American Songbook,” but the many transmutations of Bird’s venerated catalog and countless collaborations.

Now, with a three-piece rhythm section on Sunday Morning Put-On, Bird pays direct homage to the conscious and subliminal influences that have forever shaped his writing and playing: “Since age 19 to the present, jazz has been my most consistent musical companion. When I lived on Granville Avenue in Chicago, it was an obsession. I listened to Blues Before Sunrise on WBEZ every Saturday night, then Dick Buckley’s jazz show on Sundays. After some 25 years of listening and getting this music in my bones, I was finally ready to make this jazz album.”

Although the violin is largely absent from the traditional arrangements and musical era that the Andrew Bird Trio hails with Sunday Morning Put-On, the album sees Bird thinking beyond his five strings and opening his mind to untapped techniques. Treating the violin like a reed instrument—where bow pressure is like forcing breaths of air into the mouthpiece of a tenor saxophone—he harnesses a tone that blends beautifully with the intimacy of his head voice, and he channels his virtuosity through new levels of depth, longing, and versatility.

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