Three minutes into First Flight, I had already moved through curiosity, irritation, laughter and surrender. Judi Silvano opens her mouth and releases long “oooh” shapes that bend around the other instruments. Haruna Fukazawa’s flute answers with quick, bright figures, while Claire de Brunner’s bassoon moves underneath them with a dry, woody weight. The pitches scrape past one another and meet at odd angles. During the first listen, several phrases appeared to miss their destination. A second play revealed a different system: reaction carries the structure. One sound changes direction, another interrupts, and the trio builds form from those immediate decisions.

Put a bassoon beside several flutes, a voice and small percussion, and the register suddenly stretches wide enough to suggest an ensemble twice the size. Silvano sings words, syllables, breaths, cries and extended vowels; each choice gives her a different position inside the group. Sometimes she leads. Elsewhere the flute claims the melodic centre and the voice becomes another streak of colour. Bell-like percussion briefly marks the ground before the music drifts away again. Conventional song architecture gives way to collective motion, which also makes the titles unusually useful. Gathering, Flock of Three, Passing Through and Coming Together describe the trio’s behaviour: the players circle, scatter, answer and regroup. The record becomes a study of social movement conducted through breath.

Then Passing Through arrives, stays for one minute and leaves. I laughed at its timing. After several pieces packed with vocal curves and instrumental chatter, this miniature clears the table before the longer second half. Its brevity gives the sequence a needed cut, proving that the trio’s ideas often gain strength through concentration.

Around the middle, the same freedom begins charging interest. Gathering, Flock of Three and Flower Talk use different combinations of fluttering flute, bassoon punctuation and theatrical vocal sound, yet their borders gradually blur. Once the ear learns the group’s vocabulary, surprise declines with each additional swoop or sudden chirp. Flower Talk has the sharpest concept within that run, since Silvano’s invented language turns speech into pure tone and rhythm. Even there, I wanted one player to hold a plain note for an uncomfortable length of time, or for the trio to leave a larger pocket of silence. Constant unpredictability eventually becomes its own routine. The album needs occasional stillness with enough duration to make the next eruption dangerous again.

This Morning finally loosens the density. High flute calls leave wider gaps between phrases, and the softer vocal line creates a larger acoustic space. Stravinsky compresses abrupt turns into two and a half minutes, almost parodying the album’s impatience with continuity, while Beaverbrook benefits from being the longest composition. At 5:30, the trio has time to move beyond its opening gestures and test how far a shared idea can stretch before it breaks apart. The bassoon becomes especially valuable here. Its lower register adds grain and gravity to music that frequently wants to float upward.

I kept wondering where the line sits between expressive freedom and private language. First Flight often crosses into a space where the performers communicate with each other faster than the listener can translate them. That gap creates the album’s finest tension and its main limitation. Anyone expecting melody to provide a handrail will spend parts of these 33 minutes searching for the stairs. Yet the record rewards attention to physical detail: breath entering the flute, a bassoon note developing a rough edge, Silvano’s vowel changing shape in the middle of a phrase, a bell strike briefly organising the surrounding disorder. These sounds carry personality before they carry meaning. The trio asks the ear to follow gesture, density and timing, and the approach works best when each instrument maintains a distinct role.

By On the Deck and Coming Together, I had stopped waiting for the music to settle into familiar jazz language. The closing pieces gain their effect from accumulated exposure: the strange vowels sound less alien, the bassoon becomes a dependable anchor, and the flute’s sharp turns begin to register as cues within a shared exchange. Coming Together lasts barely two minutes, so reunion arrives as a quick collective decision. The modest ending suits an album built from temporary formations.

First Flight is abrasive, funny, theatrical and occasionally exhausting. Its boldest choice is the treatment of pitch as movable material, open to bends, collisions and momentary agreement. The trio repeats that method enough for several tracks to lose individual definition, though the short runtime keeps the experiment moving. My admiration and enjoyment kept changing places during each replay. Judi Silvano’s Garden Winds has created a genuine art-house object: an album with its own grammar, three sharply defined voices and a deliberately rough entrance. I finished fascinated, mildly battered and curious about where these three musicians could take this language next.

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