Bill Murray Is Now Entering His Classical Music Phase

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Bill Murray, who may or may not have started a cult without telling us, doesn't have a lot of acting gigs on his schedule in the immediate future. He'll lend his voice to Wes Anderson's upcoming stop-motion animation movie Isle Of Dogs and another animated feature called B.O.O.: Bureau of Otherworldly Operations, but that's it. Reading poetry and making surprise appearances at celebratory events can only take up so many hours in a day—so what else has Murray been occupying himself with?

According to the Times, the answer is classical music. Murray has been working at a studio in Manhattan on New Worlds, a "program of songs and literary readings paired with chamber music" led by the cellist Jan Vogler (who has played with major orchestras like the New York Philharmonic).

The songs included in the project range from Stephen Foster’s "Jeanie With the Light Brown Hair" to Van Morrison to songs from West Side Story; he also reads spoken word passages from Walt Whitman and Ernest Hemingway over Schubert and Bach pieces (the Times describes hearing him reading The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as the band plays "Moon River").

The project will make its premiere at the Festival Napa Valley in California on July 20th, followed by a North American tour that will come to Carnegie Hall on October 16th—tickets for the Carnegie show are on sale now here. A recording will also be released around August.

The Times piece also includes some suitably charming Murray anecdotes and quotes, like how director Sofia Coppola happened to stop by the studio and snap photos of Murray with the Times reporter there: “This is very unexpected," she said. "But because it’s Bill, I’m not surprised. He is always surprising. That’s what’s fun about him."

Then there's this Murray quote describing the group’s interaction, which sounds a whole lot like another mysterious bard who has gotten obsessed with mid-century American music recently.

“When they start playing,” he said, “the demand is so great that if you are attending to who you are right now, it brings out something that you couldn’t have visualized or planned for. You hear all those other voices saying, ‘That didn’t sound like Tony Bennett,’ or, ‘That B flat’s not going to break a light bulb.’ But they’re receding. They’re gone.”

Below, you can watch Murray's classical rendition of "Take Me Out To The Ballgame:"