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Guitarist Bill Frisell on His New

Solo Guitar Outing
Will Layman
11-14 minuta

Music Is

Bill Frisell

Okeh / Sony Masterworks

16 March 2018

Bill Frisell recently moved back to New York, and he has

just released a new recording of his songs, played by alone
by himself in the studio. It is an interesting moment of
reflection for the maverick but mild-mannered guitar hero,
and he is exceptionally thoughtful in conversation about the
music and homecoming.

"Home" Coming

New York is a home that he adopted in the early 1980s but

that, in so many ways, he never really left. He grew up and
attended college in Colorado, a landscape that is easy to
hear in much of his open, blue-sky music. But attending the
Berklee College of Music and that move to New York led
him to jazz, a style that he molded as much as he adopted
it, and that made him a New York musician, even if he only
lived there, properly, for less than a decade.

"As soon as I moved away from New York," Frisell says, "I
was always coming back. It always felt like home anyway. I
still was spending quite a bit of time here."

In 1988, Frisell moved to Seattle (where a scene fed by

keyboardist Wayne Horvitz, who made the same move, was
thriving). Frisell's personality, which is famously polite,
calm, and sensitive, seemed a match for the Pacific
Northwest. "Seattle was a completely different place back
then," Frisell notes, likely referring to the Seattle of a pre-
Starbucks and pre-dot-com era. "But I was coming to New
York so much to play music. That was always a challenge
with traveling. It was last spring when I left Seattle and,
already, I'm noticing how many fewer planes I've been on."

Now that he has returned, perhaps the great scope of his

career and his composing is on his mind. Music Is is just
Frisell and his guitars, usually overdubbed in subtle layers
of sound, playing both old tunes of his and new
compositions, sounding uniquely like himself: haunted and
lyrical, pastoral and quirky at the same time. You're
perfectly welcome to call it "jazz" because, really, what
other label could hold this artful music? But Frisell himself
doesn't much bother with the word. "I've never been
comfortable with splitting things up into factions or cliques.
All that stuff melts away if you just play."
Frisell as a Guitar Player Who Uses All the Options

Music Is not only revisits wonderful Frisell songs from

decades ago, but it also gives us the chance to recall why
Frisell always mattered—in jazz—as a guitar innovator.

For decades, jazz guitarists followed in the footsteps of

Charlie Christian, whose amplified guitar allowed him to
play fleet, single-note lines on an instrument that was,
previously, too quiet to compete with a jazz rhythm section
in a soloist role. Wes Montgomery added some additional
technique and his famous octave sound, but the guitarists
of these eras tended to be players who might as well have
been playing the saxophone: inventing fleet, single-note
lines that didn't necessarily use the unique elements of the
instrument. There were exceptions, of course, but players
like Grant Green, Pat Martino, Sonny Sharrock, and John
McLaughlin were still in this tradition. Frisell, whether he
was playing acoustic guitar or electric guitar with a bevy of
effects options, was strongly attentive to the sounds,
textures, and nonlinear possibilities of being a guitar player.

Music Is gives you quick performances like "Think About It"

that combine distorted attack, scratched out chords, and
phased throb. It's a guitar song. "Rambler", with its bobbing
accompaniment through some kind of detuned effect, with a
chorused melody statement that rings brightly with a jazz
feeling, also is the product of the instrument itself. "Happy
Go Lucky" shows off Frisell at his spare best—just him and
one lightly amplified, unprocessed guitar. Or there is the
finger-picked folk feeling of "Thank You", just a man with his
acoustic guitar, then joined by a few gorgeous layers of
strumming.

Frisell is keenly aware of himself as a guitar player, not just

a musician. He is a man in love with the infinite possibilities
of this particular instrument. "Robert Johnson, Segovia,
Hendrix, Jim Hall: all those people are playing the same
instrument?" he inquires, rhetorically. "That's insane, the
variety that can be achieved with those six strings."

He knows that "the effects pedals can help to amplify

something that you're hearing in the guitar. What drew me
to them first was there was something in my imagination I
couldn't quite get from a guitar." But Frisell is equally
interested in the range of sounds that are possible from the
instrument itself or, put accurately put, from the individual
sound that any particular instrument offers him.

"Right now I'm at home and surrounded by guitars in my

room. There aren't any pedals out. But what is seducing me
is—What does this guitar sound like, what does that guitar
sound like? You get fascinated by the instruments
themselves, even just two Telecasters that would seem to
be very much alike.

Until you play them and hear their personalities come out."

On a performance such as the haunting version of "Ron

Carter" on Music Is, this idea comes through. Frisell begins
with a bass line, fat and slow and resonant, then plays his
melody on top in that Telecaster twang he loves. The
reverberations are honest — the sounds of the guitars, the
room. On the second pass of the melody, he brings in high
chordal harmonies on yet another guitar, achieving layers of
sound without effects. Similarly, the opening track, "Pretty
Stars", keeps it plain and simple, with Frisell playing a
repeated pattern on one guitar, then overdubbing an
improvisation that morphs into the song's theme, eventually
with a third guitar entering. Frisell keeps the effects out of it,
but he achieves remarkable timbral variety by play high,
low, and mid-range, by playing chordaly and non-chordaly,
by using attacks that are picked and thumb-plucked. The
variations are subtle and all the more beautiful for it.

Photo: Monica Jane Frisell

Also True Solo Playing

Frisell doesn't overdub everything. On "Winslow Homer" it's

just him, all alone for the first, long stretch. What you notice
is the dramatic effect of the space he leaves in the
performance. "You have to come to feel that you don't have
to fill in every little hole," explains Frisell. "Playing solo, that
is amplified a thousand times. Someone like Leo Kottke
might get some rhythmic momentum going. But the way I
play, there is more implication of things that aren't there.
You have to get comfortable with things just hanging in the
air. You have to will the energy that's coming from the last
thing played to continue into the silence somehow."

"Miss You" may be the most dramatic recording here in that

sense. It begins out of time, full of space, then Frisell brings
in another guitar to create some rhythmic momentum. "The
Pioneers" is the purest: the guitarist and one acoustic
guitar. He holds your ear not just with a lovely, folk melody
but also with sharp shifts in register and tone. "Go Happy
Lucky" is a spare, truly solo piece for lightly amplified
electric guitar.

"Playing alone — that's always been the biggest challenge

for me. From the first time I picked up a guitar, it was my
whole way of interacting with people. It was my social life.
So, to me, that is so much of what music is about, having
that community. I've always had difficulty trying to generate
statements alone. Music has always been about being in a
band, and it was a long, long time before I tried to play
alone.

"My first solo concert was in Boston in the early '80s after
I'd been playing guitar for 20 years. I was a professional so-
called musician. I tried to do a solo gig in a loft. There were
five people in the audience and, I had prepared all this stuff.
I was supposed to play for an hour. I played though
everything I had prepared and ten minutes had gone by. I
was mortified and swore I'd never to do it again."

But here he is, mostly all alone (or, as Bill Evans put it
once, in conversations with himself), playing his songs in a
way that feels completely natural, even though they can
sound so many different ways. Music Is contains two
versions of his classic tune "Rambler". The first is angular
and eerie, with that strangely processed guitar behind the
melody. At the album's end he plays the gorgeous "Made to
Shine" like a minor coda to the whole thing, then places
another "Rambler" there: pure Frisell, with space, odd
parallel harmonies, odd squiggles, sumptuous open chords,
moments of folks simplicity.

Photo: Monica Jane Frisell

Choosing What to Play

There are 16 performances on Music Is, most of them

hovering in the two-to-three minute range. The ones you
know well sit comfortably beside brand new songs. Frisell
chose them after a long audition process, live. "My plan for
making this recording was NOT to have a plan. I played at
The Stone [the storied Lower East Side Manhattan music
space that just closed and moved to The New School] for
six nights just prior to the recording. Every night I'd go in
with music I hadn't played in a long time. I didn't want to
play what I knew was going to work. I tried to keep myself
on the edge of not knowing what I was doing all week.

"So, going into the studio, I was trying to continue that

frame of mind. I had this huge pile of music — new things,
things I hadn't played in a long time. One thing led to
another. Any overdubs just happened in that moment. We
mixed things as we went along. Every song was completely
finished before we tried another one. I would play, then we
mixed that tune before moving on."

So we get "In Line", the title track from Frisell's first ECM
recording from 1982, and it sounds daring and gorgeous
here, with bobbing guitars that create a strange,
experimental web of sound, over which the melody
cascades gently.

We also get vintage mid-career Frisell, such as "Monica

Jane" from This Land. This is a long performance, over five
minutes, and it pulls part the melody as we know it from the
original, stretching it out and making it more mysterious.
There are also new tunes, such as "Change in the Air",
which teases our ears with a guitar pattern that suggests
Paul Simon's "Sound of Silence" but then moves off in a
distinctly Frisell-ian direction.

On each performance, of course, "Frisell-ian" is the

adjective that suggests itself. At this point in his career, Bill
Frisell has become a brand unto himself. And here, finally,
his aloneness makes it all sound perfect.

"A guitar player is supposed to be able to play something by

himself," Frisell says, almost apologetically. "Slowly, slowly
over the years, I got more and more okay with it. But it still
doesn't come easily, though it's way better now.

"I can finally lose myself in the music."