BILL FRISELL - Music Is
OKeh / Sony Music Masterworks
Bill Frisell: guitar
Recorded August 2017 by Lee Townsend at Flora Recording and Playback Studio, Portland Oregon
This is Bill Frisell’s first solo recording since ‘Ghost Town’ (2000) and is played almost entirely by one man with a single guitar. A couple of tracks have Frisell overdubbing, but you can imagine that, played live, these could be worked with a simple loop pedal and so the sense that each song is recorded live is foremost in listening here. This spare use of effects works particularly well in pieces like ‘In line’ and ‘Rambler’, which he revives from his earliest ECM recordings. In the liner notes, Frisell says, ‘Playing solo is always a challenge for me, music has all along been so much about playing with other people. Having a conversation…’ From this, one might believe that the loss of a conversational partner could impair his playing (and there is a sense in his liner notes that this is something that he worried about). But Frisell has always been a musical story-teller and his guitar playing always creates gentle dramas that develop and resolve themselves, drawing in the listener so that you are as much part of the drama and as an onlooker.
In these solos then, you have a masterful storyteller presenting enthralling monologues. He spent a week at The Stone club in New York in preparation for the recording. Here he concentrated on some of the newer pieces, ‘in order to keep myself a little off balance’. And he has brought this sense of live performance with him into the recording sessions, so that while are old and new pieces, the playing has a lightness and spontaneity about them. I particularly enjoyed that way that a classic piece like ‘Ron Carter’ is given a new feel, with a sense of improvisation on a tune taken from another composer rather than one of Frisell’s best loved compositions.
Reveiwed by Chris Baber
OKeh / Sony Music Masterworks
Bill Frisell: guitar
Recorded August 2017 by Lee Townsend at Flora Recording and Playback Studio, Portland Oregon
This is Bill Frisell’s first solo recording since ‘Ghost Town’ (2000) and is played almost entirely by one man with a single guitar. A couple of tracks have Frisell overdubbing, but you can imagine that, played live, these could be worked with a simple loop pedal and so the sense that each song is recorded live is foremost in listening here. This spare use of effects works particularly well in pieces like ‘In line’ and ‘Rambler’, which he revives from his earliest ECM recordings. In the liner notes, Frisell says, ‘Playing solo is always a challenge for me, music has all along been so much about playing with other people. Having a conversation…’ From this, one might believe that the loss of a conversational partner could impair his playing (and there is a sense in his liner notes that this is something that he worried about). But Frisell has always been a musical story-teller and his guitar playing always creates gentle dramas that develop and resolve themselves, drawing in the listener so that you are as much part of the drama and as an onlooker.
In these solos then, you have a masterful storyteller presenting enthralling monologues. He spent a week at The Stone club in New York in preparation for the recording. Here he concentrated on some of the newer pieces, ‘in order to keep myself a little off balance’. And he has brought this sense of live performance with him into the recording sessions, so that while are old and new pieces, the playing has a lightness and spontaneity about them. I particularly enjoyed that way that a classic piece like ‘Ron Carter’ is given a new feel, with a sense of improvisation on a tune taken from another composer rather than one of Frisell’s best loved compositions.
Reveiwed by Chris Baber
