Andrew Bird and Meshell Ndegeocello Come to Mondavi Center

The Robert and Margrit Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts, UC Davis is pleased to announce a Just Added performance: Andrew Bird will take the Jackson Hall stage on October 21, 2019 with special guest Meshell Ndegeocello opening the evening.

Andrew Bird is an internationally acclaimed multi-instrumentalist, vocalist, whistler and songwriter. Bird has recorded and toured extensively worldwide. He has recorded with the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, appeared as Dr. Stringz on Jack's Big Music Show, and headlined concerts at Carnegie Hall, Sydney Opera House, Walt Disney Concert Hall and festivals worldwide.

In recent years, Bird performed as the Whistling Caruso in Disney's The Muppets movie, scored the FX series Baskets, performed at the New Yorker Festival, and collaborated with inventor Ian Schneller on Sonic Arboretum, an installation that exhibited at New York's Guggenheim Museum, Boston's ICA and the MCA Chicago. Bird has been a featured TED Talks presenter and a New York Times op-ed contributor. Additionally, Bird hosts an ongoing livestreamed series of performances called Live from the Great Room, putting the creative process on display for fans as he performs and converses with friends and collaborators in a candid, intimate setting.

More recently, Bird has released a series of site-specific improvisational short films and recordings called Echolocations, recorded in remote and acoustically interesting spaces: a Utah canyon, an abandoned seaside bunker, the middle of the Los Angeles River, and a reverberant stone-covered aqueduct in Lisbon. Bird's latest album, My Finest Work Yet, is out March 22, 2019 on Loma Vista Recordings.

There are albums dedicated to personal pain, or political protest, love, death, nostalgia, rage. There are those that are simply fun, glossy, the soundtrack to a good time. Some are exploratory, a musical journey, shapeshifting, soundmaking, a new way to do an old thing. An artist can make a choice about concept and content, or heed a vision, follow their muse or their manager. But in times so extreme and overwhelming, when there is no known expression for the feeling, no satisfactory direction for art or action, then they might take refuge in a process, a ritual, something familiar, the shape and sound of which recall another time altogether so that they can weather the present long enough to call it the past. Some albums are testimony, some confessions, and some are escape. Ventriloquism, the latest album from Ndegeocello, is a place, like its process, to take refuge from one storm too many.