Bill Frisell and Thomas Morgan (photograph by Monica Jane Frisell, courtesy of ECM Records)
Guitarist Bill Frisell made his debut on ECM in 1983 with the album In Line. To call his approach eclectic would be the height of understatement. My greatest regret is that it took so long for his work to come to my attention. It was only when SFJAZZ presented his multimedia project The Great Flood, in which he provided music for Bill Morrison’s cinematic reflection on the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, in April of 2012 that I realized how much highly inventive work I had been missing. Then, almost exactly a year later, Frisell returned to SFJAZZ, this time participating in a multimedia interpretation of Allen Ginsberg’s “Kaddish.”
Fortunately, those experiences left me hungry to learn more about Frisell as a musician, rather than a partner in a multimedia project. I discovered that he recorded on a variety of different labels, performing with jazz musicians that were just beginning to show up on my radar. Now I do what I can to follow his work. I continue to be impressed by his capacity for invention and by the sources that trigger that capacity.
This past Friday ECM released Epistrophy, Frisell’s second duo album with bassist Thomas Morgan. The first was Small Town, which ECM released a little less than two years ago. Like Small Town, Epistrophy is a live recording of a performance at the Village Vanguard. Anyone who reads this site regularly should know by now that the album is named after one of Thelonious Monk’s more unorthodox compositions, and it is one that he probably played many times to Vanguard audiences. Indeed, that sense of Monk’s presence that remains at the Vanguard was reinforced when Frisell and Morgan decided to play another Monk tune in their session, “Pannonica.” However, while Monk used both of these tunes to seek out new directions in his keyboard work, Frisell and Morgan have repurposed them for their own approaches to performance on guitar and bass.
However, Frisell does not need to turn to unorthodox themes to prompt his own capacity for invention. He is just as comfortable seeking new directions through a folk song as familiar as “Red River Valley” or, for that matter, John Barry’s title music for the James Bond film You Only Live Twice. Nevertheless, my own preferences tend to be for music that is already forging into uncharted territory before Frisell works his own take on the source. As a result, I was delighted to listen to his performance of Paul Motian’s “Mumbo Jumbo;” but I was equally in hog heaven with his approach to Billy Strayhorn’s “Lush Life.”
Mind you, Frisell was not the first to turn to a cowboy song for inspiration. In 1957 Contemporary released the Sonny Rollins album Way Out West. Rollins, of course, is another jazz master closely associated with the history of the Village Vanguard; and Frisell claims that Way Out West was “One of the first jazz LPs I ever bought.” However, none of the tracks on Rollins’ album took on a folk source as traditional as “Red River Valley.” If anything, Rollins was poking fun at the Tin Pan Alley community trying to write better folk music than music that actually had folk sources. Frisell is clearly more interested in music so traditional that its source is unknown, and that seems to allow him greater breadth in the way in which he transforms that music into jazz fit to rub shoulders with the likes of Monk and Strayhorn.
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