While visiting his parents in Madison, Chicago-based bassist Jakob Heinemenn encountered a box full of strange tchotchkes on the street. The most curious offering was a songbook called New and Original Favorite Songs of Famous Hill Billies: Songs of Heart and Home, Romance, Pathos, and Comedy—a compendium of country and faux-traditional songs written by radio musicians and songwriters at the turn of the 1930s. The titles were alternately nostalgic, mournful, and goofy (i.e. “Rock Me to Sleep in the Rockies”); the plaintive melodies often consisted of just a simple repeating phrase or two. The music reminded Heinemann, somehow, of his friends and collaborators Chet Zenor (guitar) and Andy Danstrom (drums). Subsequently, Alta Vista was formed—an experimental instrumental trio eager to tear down the dividing lines between American musical idioms. On their debut self-titled album—comprised almost entirely of Songs of Heart and Home selections—they import earnest inspiration and inventive modern gestures into these lost compositions.

Years before Alta Vista was formed, its three members played together in both a rock band and fairly straight-ahead modern jazz quartet in Chicago, noticing that their individual musical personalities had contrasting but complementary modalities. Zenor’s guitar playing evidences an Americana influence, mixing country and jazz vocabularies; on Alta Vista, his melodic expositions sound rootsy and otherworldly at the same time. Heinemenn’s orientation is more toward avant-garde and free music; in the group’s most outré moments, his bass approach often changes the whole harmonic and textural context of the song. Danstrom’s sensibility bridges Zenor’s song-forward approach and Heinemann’s improvisatory instincts, channeling the impressionism and roughshod grooves of Paul Motian.

The group approached their century-old source material with a mixture of intuition and reverence. “At first, we wanted to try to fuck the songs up a bit, using an improvisers approach,” Heinemann explains. “At a certain point, though, it was like ‘let’s just play the song.’ We realized each song was unique and we needed to take care to give it a special treatment.” Tunes that the group initially attempted in a jokey or less formally grounded style were scrapped. Their process often started from a heady or unusual place, but they usually found themselves refocusing their efforts around the original melody.

Lead single “When the Deserts Are in Bloom” is a fitting introduction to the album, exemplifying the way in which the group situates a tune in a radical context without warping it out of recognition or condescending to it. Here, the trio engages with their home city’s post-rock legacy, holding down a driving beat and athletic bass line in the vein of Tortoise while Zenor patiently and faithfully runs down the song’s plaintive melody. On “Old Nevada Home,” the group is more restrained, maintaining a vintage, C&W-adjacent ambience. However, the primary tune eventually dissipates behind eerie harmonics, pointillistic bass thwacks, and faint swells of free percussion, making for one of the record’s most beautiful and desolate moments.

Alta Vista’s bleakest moment is “The Price I Have to Pay,” the group’s reimagining of a down-and-out ballad in which the narrator expresses regret about nearly all of the major decisions in his life. The song begins in muted chaos, revolving around a droning, serrated-sounding chord for the first minute; from there, Zenor launches into an interpretation of the melody which becomes increasingly fractured. Heinemann eventually takes center stage, pushing the song into an uncanny realm with unsteady tonality and screeching overbowing.

These songs exemplify Alta Vista’s immediately engaging musical parlance, which one might think of as the byproduct of a game of musical telephone. The LP’s compositions were originally written by commercial songwriters to evoke the spirit of “traditional” music—100 years later, these imitations are being interpreted by millennial-era players living in the urban Midwest. As a result, Zenor says, the record functions like “a window into a window,” providing a several-times-removed view of the romanticized world evoked by these songs and a dream-like view of our American musical heritage. The trio also worked to communicate the “emotional reality” they hear within these compositions, even if the larger cultural sphere the songs evoke was never real at all. The result of this is a commanding set of music from some of the most exciting rising voices in the Chicago jazz and indie rock scenes.