If ever there was a natural home for a jazz artist, then David Murray has found it with Impulse! Records. The wonder is that it had not happened years earlier, but then David Murray has been a difficult man to pin down after creating some of the finest albums of 1980s on the Black Saint label with the World Saxophone Quartet, and his own Octet and Quartet, moving to the Continent, launching on several ambitious projects, then seeming to drift off the main festivals of the European circuit. But he was still out there, and in 2024, Francesca, recorded by his new quartet showed Murray was back in business.

But there is no escaping the weight of his distinguished past. Peering over his shoulder is his mid-1980s quartet for the ages with John Hicks on piano, Reggie Workman on bass and Ed Blackwell on drums and his 1989 quartet with Hicks, Ray Drummond on bass and Ralph Peterson Jr on drums. For the avoidance of doubt, these are hard acts to follow. But Murray does not try to. The album opens with the title track featuring Ekep Nkwelle’s excellent vocal against Marta Sanchez’s rootless fourths in ¾, the spirit of past quartets remain but recast in the present. ‘Bald Ego,’ a 12-bar blues, whose theme is both embellishment of, and paraphrase around, Charlie Parker’s ‘Cheryl,’ while ‘Bird’s the Word,’ has the theme woven around Parker’s ‘Confirmation,’ a 32 AABA song with the A sections based on the chords of ‘Twilight Time’ and the B section Parker’s own chords.

A part of the Birdsong Project, hence the bird theme of the album, it includes three poems by Francesca Cinelli, two set to music (‘Birdie Serenade’ and ‘Song of the World’) sung by Ekep Nkwelle, and ‘Oiseau de Paradis,’ with the narration by the poet herself. Album highlights are ‘Black Bird’s Gonna Lite Up the Night’ and ‘Capistrano Swallow,’ featuring unbuttoned, swashbuckling solos of Murray of old.