| Jazz |
First Flight: Judi Silvano’s Garden Winds invents an instrumentation from scratch.
Jazz has had over a century to try every conceivable combination of instruments, and yet every so often a group comes along built around a pairing so specific and so rarely attempted that it feels almost like discovering new physics. Judi Silvano’s Garden Winds, voice and percussion, flute and bassoon, appears to be exactly that kind of group. A close look at the historical record turns up plenty of flute-and-percussion duos and a handful of flute-and-bassoon pairings, but nothing quite matching this trio’s specific three-way combination with any real recording history behind it. First Flight, the group’s debut album, isn’t just a strong record on its own musical terms, it’s a genuine act of instrumentation invention, and it treats that novelty as an opportunity rather than a gimmick.
To understand why Judi Silvano would be the one to dream up this particular ensemble, it helps to look at the sheer range of her career. Trained in both music and dance at Temple University, she sang with Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra before she was old enough to legally order the beer at the Showboat Jazz Club where she first heard Rahsaan Roland Kirk and the Keith Jarrett Trio. She moved to New York in 1976 and built a career that has run in parallel tracks ever since – choreographer and dancer, painter, jazz vocalist, composer, educator, concert producer – with a fifty-year collaborative partnership with saxophonist Joe Lovano running through the middle of it all. Anyone who spent Monday nights at the Village Vanguard in the ‘80s soaking up Thad Jones’s charts for the Mel Lewis Jazz Orchestra, as Silvano did, absorbing enough to eventually sing along with the lead trumpet parts, will understand exactly where her horn-like, instrumentally minded approach to vocalizing comes from. Across fourteen previous albums as a leader – duos, trios, quartets, a quintet, a sextet – Silvano has rarely repeated an ensemble configuration twice. Garden Winds, formed with musicians she began playing with during the pandemic years and named for her lifelong love of nature’s variety, is simply the latest and perhaps most bright expression of that restlessness.
Silvano didn’t build this trio alone, and the other two-thirds of Garden Winds bring their own hard-won fluency in exactly the kind of boundary-crossing playing this project demands. Bassoonist Claire de Brunner answered a Village Voice ad in the 1980s seeking a musician who loved Kafka, Captain Beefheart, and Lennie Tristano – she knew none of the latter two references at the time – and became a founding member of the post-punk-era band 101 Crustaceans before later studying jazz improvisation directly with Lee Konitz and pianist Connie Crothers. She’s described the process of adapting her classically trained bassoon technique to improvisation as effectively learning an entirely new instrument, a decade-long undertaking that gives her playing on First Flight real depth of purpose.
Flutist Haruna Fukazawa, originally from Tokyo, trained classically at Musashino Academia Musicae before her mentor Frank Wess encouraged the move to New York that launched her improvising career. A 2026 GRAMMY nominee and multiple-time National Flute Association Jazz Flute Big Band winner, she made history in 2010 as the first Japanese musician to perform at Italy’s Trieste Summer Rock Festival, and she brings a technical facility to this recording that lets her shift between melodic lead and pure texture within a single phrase.
What’s most striking about First Flight, across its brisk thirty-three minutes, is how little it resembles conventional song structure and how much it resembles a genuine three-way conversation, where meaning accumulates through the act of listening and answering rather than through pre-set melody and accompaniment roles. The title track opens the record in a mood that’s simultaneously calm and quietly adventurous, easing listeners into a sound world where Silvano’s voice, Fukazawa’s flute, and de Brunner’s bassoon trade the role of “lead instrument” so fluidly that the question stops mattering within the first minute.
“Gathering” leans into haunting vocal lines and genuinely rhythmic ideas, treating Silvano’s percussion work as connective tissue between the two winds rather than mere timekeeping, while “Flock of Three” lives up to its title with real collective spirit and energy. “Stravinsky” compresses its ideas into a brisk two and a half minutes, its playful, angular turns nodding openly to the composer’s influence without ever becoming pastiche. “Flower Talk” is arguably the album’s clearest distillation of Silvano’s vocalese approach, improvised syllables that strip literal language down to rhythm, emphasis, and emotional temperature, closer to a fourth instrumental voice than to conventional lyric singing.
“This Morning” earns its title honestly, its high flute calls and wider spacing between phrases genuinely evoking a forest slowly waking up, while the miniature “Passing Through”, barely a minute long, functions as a palate-cleansing breath between longer, denser statements. “On the Deck” and “Beaverbrook” give the trio its most spacious canvases, the latter’s five and a half minutes allowing ideas room to develop well past their first appearance, with de Brunner’s bassoon providing a grounding centre of gravity beneath the brighter registers above it. The album closes with “Coming Together,” a fittingly concise final statement, barely two minutes, that brings the record’s recurring imagery of birds, flocks, and gatherings to a natural, unforced close.
It’s worth being honest about what this record asks of a listener: First Flight moves fast, trusts pitch as flexible, negotiable material, and rarely settles into anything resembling a hook. That’s precisely the point. This is a trio actively inventing its own musical grammar in real time, and the payoff for sticking with it is considerable. Details that seem to fly past on a first listen (a bell strike briefly organizing the ensemble, the exact moment a sustained bassoon tone takes on grain and texture, Silvano’s vowels quietly shifting shape) reveal themselves more clearly on repeat plays, and the trio’s distinct musical personalities come into sharper focus each time.
Given how rare this instrumentation is – the nearest analogues on record remain flute-and-percussion duos like Kaoru Watanabe and Tatsuya Nakatani’s Michiyuki, or flute-and-bassoon pairings like the Alfa-On Trio’s Noreña Suite – Garden Winds isn’t just filling a gap in the jazz catalog. It’s demonstrating, with ten tracks, exactly why that gap existed for so long: this combination takes real vision, and real trust between three musicians, to pull off convincingly. First Flight pulls it off with real distinction, and it leaves you curious to hear exactly where this trio goes next.
Frankie Pfeiffer
Editor in chief – PARIS-MOVE
PARIS-MOVE, September 3rd, 2026
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Musicians:
Judi Silvano – voice & percussion
Haruna Fukazawa – flutes
Claire de Brunner – bassoon
Tracklisting:
- First Flight 2:57 (Judi Silvano)
- Gathering 4:18 (Judi Silvano)
- Flock Of Three 4:32 (Judi Silvano)
- Stravinsky 2:38 (Judi Silvano)
- Flower Talk 3:15 (Judi Silvano)
- Passing Through 1:00 (Judi Silvano)
- This Morning 2:29 (Judi Silvano)
- On The Deck 4:28 (Judi Silvano)
- Beaverbrook 5:30 (Judi Silvano)
- Coming Together 2:08 (Judi Silvano)
Total time (CD): 33:34
Total time (LP): 33:14
Upcoming Live Events:
Saturday, September 19, 2026
Elysium Furnace Works presents: Judi Silvano’s “Garden Winds”
NEW RELEASE CELEBRATION of FIRST FLIGHT
featuring:
Haruna Fukazawa, flutes
Claire de Brunner, bassoon
Judi Silvano, voice and percussion