Neil Pearlman turns “The Falcon” into a musical reflection on how small actions can become forces far larger than their origins. The piece began during the pandemic and the protests following George Floyd’s murder, when Pearlman was thinking about the butterfly effect: how a single person, event, or microscopic change can set something much bigger into motion.
That idea is built directly into the song’s central image. The falcon has been released by its falconer, who no longer controls where it goes. What happens next belongs to the force that has already been set in motion. Pearlman translates that progression into an arrangement that grows from a single seed into increasingly complex layers, bringing Celtic fiddle into conversation with funk, jazz fusion, rock, and horns.
The result is less about predicting where change will lead than accepting the uncertainty of releasing it. With Jeremy Kittel’s fiddle at the center of the collaboration, “The Falcon” treats genre itself as another boundary to cross. The falcon has been released. Now the question is what it will set in motion.
