Three Thousand Songs Records presents The First Songs, a musical performance that takes as its point of departure the Brown Thrasher, a bird known for its ability to mimic its environment and transform it into countless variations of sounds and melodies. Composed by multidisciplinary artist David Zink Yi and his long-standing collaborators, a group of international musicians interpret an improvisatory score inspired by the birds’ remarkable musical repertoire, believed to be one of the world’s largest. Mirroring the bird’s mode of song, together they engage in a live compositional process built not through invention, but through imitation as a form of essential renewal, where notions of originality and authorship, and the processes through which they are formed, are brought into question. Drawing on compositional strategies from jazz and Latin jazz, as well as Afro-diasporic folklore, and popular music from the Caribbean, particularly Cuba, and using wind and brass instruments, hybrid percussion sets, self-built instruments, and sound objects, they explore new ways of expressing musical histories and traditions. 

The Brown Thrasher offers the project a conceptual framework that draws upon the animal’s nomadism and constant imitation, reinvention, and re-claiming of the world around it. With that point of reference, the artists explore the origins of music in the Afro-Caribbean context and how it developed its own creole sound language through strategies of appropriation and adaptation. Through this sensorial space, Zink Yi and collaborators invite the audience to share a sonic environment in and through the body, giving insight into how cultural practices rooted in lived experience contribute to new forms of understanding across communities and societies.