Meet Bill Frisell, one of my favorite artists of recent years. If you've heard anything of his at all, chances are it was from the soundtrack for Finding Forrester.
He's ostensibly a jazz musician, but his interests are all over the place. In the last few years alone he's done albums of blues, country, world music & bluegrass. He's a bit like another of my favorite artists, Ry Cooder- a guitar virtuoso who's interests led him far afield. Ry started out a pure blues man and eventually worked it way around to jazz and world music...Bill started out a pure downtown NYC jazz guy, part of the John Zorn mafia, who wound his way eventually to the blues and american roots music. But where Ry finds an interest and mines it for a while, Bill hits it and quits it, changing gears from album to album. And where Ry comes out with a new project every couple of years, Bill is good for a couple of albums a year. Keeping up with him can be a challenge.
Last year I was fortunate enough to catch him live, here in the costal backwater I call home. One of the local jazz dj's who works next door to me at the record store dabbles in promoting from time to time and managed to land Frisell for a show between consecutive weekends in LA and SF...it didn't hurt that his drummer's parents lived in town. My wife had seen him many times years ago when she lived in The City and assured me it would change my life.
Correct!
The show was music as spiritual communion, the kind of thing you can't begin to describe without sounding like a new age loon high on crystals and herbal tea.
Some of that feeling is captured on disc one of this release. There's magic you can't catch with a microphone, but live is better than studio and this is a great live set. The lineup is the same as the one I saw, minus the guy who played pedal steel and slide guitar (I forget his name, but he plays with everybody- lucinda williams, kd lang, everybody), and they play a bunch of the same tunes, plus a transcendent version of I Heard It Through the Grapevine (my pal says they did this one at the sound check here, but it didn't appear in the show).
Fantastic stuff. I haven't even gotten to the second disc yet, but I'm in love.
An aside for my midwestern readers:
Viktor Krauss plays bass on disc one and the show I saw. He's a native of Champaign, Illinois and studied music at the University of Illinois. He apparently has a cd coming out on Nonesuch with Bill on guitar....if you're lucky enough to have him play nearby jump on that shit, I guarantee you won't regret it.
Bax rating: 10 out of 10.
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