Gabriel Kahane

With Magnificent Bird, his fifth solo LP and second album for Nonesuch Records, Kahane brings to life a trunk of songs written in self-imposed isolation—a full year off the internet—with the help of a dozen colleagues, including Andrew Bird, Chris Thile, Sylvan Esso’s Amelia Meath, and Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Caroline Shaw, whose long-distance contributions were made possible, paradoxically, through the very technology he had shunned.

“I wanted to make something spare,” he explains, “something that reflected the hermetic experience I’d just had. But I was also having this impulse, after being isolated for so long, to reconnect with my people. Everyone who plays on this album is someone I love as a person as much as I do as a musician. The truth is, I just wanted an excuse to get in touch with my friends.

The collaborators who appear on Magnificent Bird—a list that also includes composer/performers Nathalie Joachim and Pekka Kuusisto; the celebrated clarinetist Anthony McGill; avant-folk stalwarts Sam Amidon and Holcombe Waller; longtime colleagues Gabriel Cabezas, Casey Foubert, Paul Kowert, Chris Morrissey, Ted Poor, Alex Sopp, and Elizabeth Ziman; and mix engineer Joseph Lorge—reflect the breadth of Kahane’s vibrant musical world. “If nothing else,” he says, “this record is a pure expression of community.”