Jump Little Children: Reveling in a Revival

Pop culture is enduring an extended season of reboots and revivals, where the old, yanked from yesteryear, is made new again. Full House was given a sequel series on Netflix; The CW has an update on Charmed gliding onto air this month; Universal tried (and spectacularly failed) last year to pump new blood into its library of classic monsters with The Mummy; bands from At the Drive-In to A Perfect Circle have, over the last half decade, each released new records after years of silence. The export of beloved entertainers from bygone times has an irresistible pull.

Caught in that pull is indie-baroque rock group Jump, Little Children, born of the early-to-mid ’90s, sidelined in the mid 2000s, now returned to form with their first album in 13 years, the thoroughly vital Sparrow, a showcase for their knack for layering sounds not typically associated with the genre’s foundational rhythms and tones: accordions, harmonicas, mandolins and tin whistles, accompanied by the rich, full-bodied resonance of double basses and cellos. One need not fuss rock fundamentals to feign sophistication, but Sparrow reads as elegant without pretense. It’s an album as honest as it is welcome to the ears.

But Sparrow’s best recommendation is a new chance to see Jump, Little Children live. On September 28th, they took the stage at City Winery in Boston, the seventh show of their latest tour, which kicked off in North Carolina back in September; expectedly, their set mostly comprised tracks off of Sparrow—”Je Suis Oblivion,” “Hand On My Heartache,” “Voyeuropa,” “White Buffalo,” “Euphoria Designed,” “X-Raying Flowers”—but equally as expectedly, they wove a handful of past hits among them—”Habit,” “Mexico,” “All Those Days are Gone,” “Cathedrals.” There’s an awesome temporal effect to that selection. Watching the band play felt like watching time’s flow in reverse, the assertive polish of their present-day output acknowledging the nostalgic echo of their past.

“It feels like that for us, too,” Matthew Bivins says with a laugh, talking to Paste by phone on the road to Athens, Ga. (Think of Bivins as Jump, Little Children’s jack-of-all-trades: Those tin-whistle and accordion contributions are all his. He plays a mean keytar, too.) “We haven’t seen the Georgia theater since it burned down, so we’re super excited. But it’s really going to be a time warp for us, I think.”

For Bivins, recording Sparrow without first touring the songs helped the band bridge the gap between who they were and who they’ve become—not that that was necessarily deliberate. “I’d love to say that we were very specific about it in some ways, but we weren’t,” he says. “We didn’t know the songs when we went into the studio, which was really, really great because we had no preconceived notions. We had no muscle memory.”

But while Sparrow is their first new album in ages, they’ve toured off-and-on during that time, most recently 2015’s Church and Queen Tour, a six-show series that met with a big enough response to require three additional club dates to satisfy demand. But for most of City Winery’s patrons, this was the first opportunity to see the band play live since their 30s, or maybe 20s, or—like me—even their college days.

The unabashed joy in the audience was matched by Jump, Little Children’s members—Matthew Bivens, Jay Clifford, Ward Williams, Jonathan Gray and Evan Bivins. Recalling the Church and Queen Tour, Matthew says, “We realized pretty quickly that we could not continue to be a reunion band. As people who like to create things, we knew that we would have to have something brand new.”

And at City Winery, he made clear how thankful the band is to see their new creation embraced by the people who made it possible. “You don’t have a choice, but may I say something?” Matthew asked the Boston audience as the show came to an end, thanking us for our support; he spoke of community, and indeed, it was impossible to overlook that feeling of belonging to a collective built on more than shared taste in music.

“Sparrow means a lot to us on many, many levels, as friends and as creative, and the ability to have something due for our fans that are still coming after all the time—it’s just a beautifully overwhelming thing,” he says, pointing out that the act of getting back together to play in the first place provided the impetus for the record.

The energy they brought to the stage was infectious, whether they were engaging the crowd or playing a song. They had as much fun with the former as the latter; Gray demonstrated his proficiency with the double bass, practically dancing about the stage with his outsized instrument, while Matthew pulled off the Herculean feat of jamming on his keytar while hanging onto his accordion.

And in between songs, they told jokes and poked a bit of fun at themselves, too. “There’s a slight ‘We’re a wedding band’ vibe going on here,” Matthew cracked at one point, a nod to the space’s set-up: dimmed lights, long tables packed with people, each table decorated with wine bottles and glasses. The band ran with that gag for the rest of the show’s duration. Most of them, they said, have officiated weddings themselves.

The sheer, rapturous brio of Jump, Little Children’s work served a valuable reminder that absence can indeed make the heart grow fonder. Maybe we’re at peak reboot; maybe we’ve had one too many revivals for pop culture’s health and well-being. But if we’re to accept the stream of yesteryear’s pop culture returning to the fold, then at least pop culture can reward us the way that Jump, Little Children rewarded Boston’s faithful.

Boston-based culture writer Andy Crump has been writing about film and television online since 2009 (and music since 2018). You can follow him on Twitter and find his collected writing at his personal blog. He is composed of roughly 65% craft beer.