Once upon a time, Bill Murray was on a flight from Berlin to New York, where he met the cellist Jan Vogler. The two became friends and decided to make an album together. New Worlds explores the intersection of music and literature and it will be out in September of this year. We first learned of this project back in April, when the New York Times reported that New Worlds has Murray singing Gershwin, West Side Story, and Stephen Foster and reading selections from Whitman, Hemingway, and Twain. Vogler accompanied Murray on cello, and other contributors include Mira Wang (violin) and Vanessa Perez (piano). New Worlds will premiere live on 6/4 at the Dresden Music Festival in Germany to be followed by a performance on 7/20 in Napa. The show will come to New York City on 10/16 at Carnegie Hall and a world tour is confirmed for the fall and will continue into next year. The live set is supposed to “explore themes of American history and identity.” Check out the New Worlds tracklist below.

New Worlds tracklisting (unsequenced)

Johann Sebastian Bach — “Prelude” from “Cello Suite No. 1 in G Major, BWV 1007″
Walt Whitman From “Song of the Open Road” and “Song of Myself”
Stephen Foster “Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair”
Ernest Hemingway “With Pascin at the Dome” from A Moveable Feast
Astor Piazzola — “La Muerte del Angel”
George Gershwin “It Ain’t Necessarily So” from Porgy & Bess
Astor Piazzolla — “Oblivion”
James Fenimore Cooper from The Deerslayer
Maurice Ravel “Blues” from “Sonata for violin and piano No. 2″
James Thurber — “If Grant Had Been Drinking at Appomattox” from Writings And Drawings (The Library of America)
Henry Mancini Arr. Grafe 5 “Moon River”
Mark Twain from Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (excerpt)
Leonard Bernstein Arr. Stephen Buck “Somewhere,” “I Feel Pretty” and “America” from West Side Story

New Worlds is out this September via Decca Gold.