There is something wonderfully unforced about the strangeness of Judi Silvano’s latest release, “First Flight.” Her group, Judi Silvano’s Garden Winds, brings together Silvano’s voice and percussion, Haruna Fukazawa’s flutes and Claire de Brunner’s bassoon, dispensing entirely with the conventional piano-bass-drums infrastructure of a jazz ensemble.
What remains is an unusually exposed three-way conversation in which breath, texture and silence carry as much weight as melody. The album’s ten concise pieces were conceived around the trio’s shared approach to improvisation, with Silvano describing the project as an exploration of the sounds and spaces created by “winds playing together.” The result is a sequence of miniature environments: playful, unpredictable and frequently beautiful.
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The title track establishes the album’s character particularly well. Described in the accompanying material as simultaneously calm and adventurous, “First Flight” introduces a record interested in movement without necessarily requiring a fixed destination. “Gathering” moves into darker territory, pairing Silvano’s more haunting vocal ideas with a stronger rhythmic impulse.
“Stravinsky” introduces another side of the record. Rather than attempting anything resembling a formal homage, the piece channels the composer’s influence through playfulness and disruption, allowing unexpected shapes and rhythmic fragments to collide.
Nature is an ever-present theme across the album, and it’s not difficult to see why, given how the project was literally recorded in Silvano’s garden. The aptly titled “This Morning” is intended to evoke a forest gradually awakening, and the five-and-a-half-minute “Beaverbrook,” the album’s longest piece, gives the trio enough room for a more episodic exploration. The closing “Coming Together” then provides an appropriate conclusion to a record whose real subject is collective listening.
What makes First Flight particularly interesting is its restraint. An ensemble this unconventional could easily turn novelty into its defining feature, but Garden Winds seems far more interested in discovering what this particular combination of sounds can actually do. The album runs only around 33 minutes, and that economy keeps the experimentation approachable.
First Flight is an enjoyable record that doesn’t try to make its unusual instrumentation sound conventional. Voice, flute and bassoon remain strange companions, and the trio embraces that strangeness. At its best, the album feels like chamber jazz being gently dismantled and rebuilt in real time: melodic one moment, abstract the next, occasionally humorous, occasionally eerie, but consistently attentive to the possibilities hidden inside space and sound.