The Studio, Sydney Opera House
May 4
There are few contemporary jazz guitarists in whom you can’t hear some influence of Bill Frisell. He came to my notice in the 1980s on recordings by Don Byron and Jon Zorn, on two of his own, Lookout For Hope and Rambler with Kenny Wheeler. It was indeed very different playing, but nothing is so original that you cannot trace influences.
In classic rock guitar the dissonant elements occurred more often in the sound – in distortion and feedback – than in the intervals. In jazz it was the reverse. The sound was often clean, the intervals more chromatic and becoming increasingly dissonant. On Pharoah Sanders’s Thembi, Sonny Sharrock emerged with a free jazz combination of both. In more recent times I have read a rock critic describing Sharrock as a Jimi Hendrix clone. In fact Thembi was recorded in the year preceding the release of Hendrix’s Hey Joe and Purple Haze. Who knows if either one influenced the other. What was clear, because he said so, was that Bill Frisell was influenced by Jim Hall and Jimi Hendrix. It sounded as if Sharrock might have been an influence too, but we will probably never know.
Acquaintances who had heard Frisell in person told me that he was surprisingly quiet. No one knew quite how he produced those rock cum free jazz effects at a relatively intimate level. Forget dissonance, distortion and feedback for a moment.
There was another side to Frisell, in which we heard floating, remote and dreaming pastoral tones. They were applied in two very different contexts: when he played sophisticated Broadway ballads with Joe Lovano and when he transmitted the sounds of rural America to jazz listeners. It was certainly not the first time by a long way that a jazz guitarist sounded like a country guitarist, or vice versa, but Frisell’s jazz connection was often avant garde, his rural connection very folksy indeed. So folksy it was somewhat surreal, and that was very much part of the appeal. In the 1940s Andy Kirk and his Clouds of Joy, a popular big band, had a hit with Floyd’s Guitar Blues, the first recording to feature an electric Hawaiian guitar. I often wonder whether Frisell ever heard it. Frisell, incidentally, played the clarinet early on, and this may or may not account for the intriguing interaction with clarinetist Byron. On Byron’s The Tuskegee Experiments Frisell was often at his most avant and rocky. On a much later disk, Romancing With The Unseen, he and Byron play Lennon & McCartney’s beautiful I’ll Follow The Sun, and the Beatles association made me aware that there can be a touch of George Harrison in his playing. Also a spooky effect from spaghetti western soundtracks by Nino Rota. So broad is Frisell’s canvas that you can start hearing everything in there.
Country guitar influences were more obvious on Frisell’s own albums, on which he went deeper and deeper into the broad area of Americana, until it was not hard to imagine him playing on a Bob Dylan album. But to step back, I feel I have to mention the 1984 ECM album Rambler with trumpeter Kenny Wheeler (often playing cornet and flugelhorn here). The drummer is Paul Motian. The time is often very free, but there is also a little march sequence featuring tuba virtuoso Bob Stewart. One track is very Spanish or Mexican. Frisell plays guitar and guitar synthesiser. The melodies are often poignant and folk-like, but with wide and unusual intervals. They are all Frisell’s tunes. Oddly enough they have some similarity to Kenny Wheeler’s writing. This is heartrending and exhilarating music with expansions of glorious sound – as you might imagine with such sound painters and sculptors as Wheeler and Frisell. Everybody involved in the various directions of contemporary jazz should revisit this.
I must confess that I have not listened much to Frisell recently. Boy, has that suddenly changed! It was with open ears and expectations that I heard him at the Opera House Studio. This was the last of three American bands we heard in close proximity. Two – Charlie Haden and Frisell – were a Sydney spin-off from the very successful Melbourne International Jazz Festival.
Electronic bird song, perhaps a recording of an actual bird, accompanied the brief tune up and continued into the free interaction that preceded the first tune – indeed it was hard to tell where the tune up ended and the playing began – at a certain point you just realised that, hey, this is happening! A surging waltz, a wide wash of guitar sound like many guitars playing, sent them on their way, with drummer Kenny Wollesen cymbals and gongs splashing and sounding and Tony Scherr’s bass walking powerfully through it. And this uplifting feeling continued right through the single set, in which tune followed tune without a break.
At points the guitar sound hardened and focused in high, heart-rending cries. It was often deeply countrified. Frisell’s country droinggg droinggg figures were sustained a little longer than the most deliberately slow-handed country picker would hold them, giving that Frisell sense of free expanding time over the tight country snap of bass and drums, though they could be free enough as well. John Shand’s comment that the trio has a sophistication all its own, masquerading as a bent bar band, was perfect. Indeed they often had something that reminded me of the peculiar cross between weird bebop, rock and country played by the band in the first Star Wars movie. Well, not really, but you know what I mean.
Frisell used many effects – sometimes switching less than suavely – including octave divider, an old fashioned chorus setting, rocky distortion, and sometimes played clean pellucid lines suggesting Jim Hall. Scherr’s technique was as odd as any I have seen. Sometimes he held the bass at arm’s length like a rockabilly cat and sometimes he lifted his left elbow right up above his head for more complex manipulations. I recognised few tunes but everything was glorious. One piece seemed to combine Charles Mingus with a section of my Man’s Gone Now from Porgy And Bess. There was an African feel, tune unknown to me. I did not even recognize the brilliantly played fast bebop; but I did know The Pretenders’ tune that finished the set before the two encores, though I did not remember what it was called. Ah, yes, it was Back On The Chain Gang. It kept repeating, with snatches of improvisation rising through it. I didn’t care if it went on forever.
The first encore was Hank Williams’s Lovesick Blues (a tune of my childhood that I still have on record) and the second sounded like a mixture of Rag Mop and hints of Duke Ellington’s C-Jam Blues. It was sometimes like swing era swing, sometimes bebop and sometimes Western swing. They are all closely related and are the basis of popular music through decades of the 20th century. While that will always be part of Frisell’s music, it is now clear that he was one of the people back in the 1980s who were pointing the way into the 21st century. Don’t let me hear this last-of-the-innovators stuff again. There are always innovators.
Due to pressing matters, my reviews of Quartet West and Joshua Redman will follow in not too many days.