Andrew Bird | Alan Hampton | Ted Poor : Sunday Morning Put-On

When I was in my 20s, I lived in an old apartment/hotel in the Edgewater neighbourhood of Chicago. A relic from better times (the 1920s), it was cheap and inhabited mostly by retired Jesuit priests and nuns from nearby Loyola University. The gym had old Schwinn 10-speedbicycles up on cinder blocks for low-rent pelotons, an old swimming pool where they played opera, and the steam room was a clubhouse for the local Russian mob. Most Saturday nights I’d stay up listening to a radio show called ‘Blues Before Sunrise’ on WBEZ from 12-4 am. The DJ, Steve Cushing, played old rare 78 rpm records of blues, jazz and gospel. Then I’d sleep for a few hours and wake to Dick Buckley’s show, also on WBEZ, featuring what he called ‘Golden Era’ jazz from the ’30s and ’40s. My love for a certain era of jazz up through the mid 20th century has been constant through many transmutations in my own work, the bulk of which is not jazz at all. I’ll admit that under the