I was wondering if anyone had any opinions on whether Bill Frisell’s new album, the trio with Dave Holland & Elvin Jones, was any good. I write as someone who at one point in the early 1990s was buying everything Frisell & John Zorn were doing the moment it hit the shops, but gradally stopped doing so–circa Nashville for Frisell, & circa the time Zorn started to turn his attention to string quartets & grinding out the Masada discs. Anyway, heard snippets of the BF/DH/EJ disc in the shop the other day, & the rather unlikely combination of Frisell & Jones did sound as unsettling as I expected, but I didn’t have a chance to make closer acquaintance with the disc.
Possibly the answer is “no” but in case not I thought I’d give this a little bump. --N
Hey Ndorward,
I’m hijacking your thread, but only because I want to talk about Bill Frisell. Have you heard Power Tools? I have that, plus Is That You, Where in the World?, and Gone, Just Like a Train.
Power Tools packed the most punch guitarwise, but Where in the World? had the best compositions. I would also recommend Henry Kaiser’s Remarrying for Money because it has a duet with Frisell called “Last of the Few.”
My 2cents.
Ah yes, Power Tools–I think they only had one record, called Strange Meeting? Not sure if it ever came out on CD–it was a mid-1980s disc, with Frisell, Ronald Shannon Jackson & Melvin Gibbs, if memory serves. I don’t know it well, as I’ve never owned a copy–a student radio station I used to DJ for had it on vinyl & I played it every so often. – The title track has become probably the closest thing to a signature tune in Frisell’s oeuvre–he’s recorded it about half a dozen times, I think.
He’s a remarkable player, whatever my doubts about his occasional soft-centredness on his own recordings, especially recently. Perhaps many of Frisell’s greatest moments come on other leaders’ discs: notably, with Zorn & the Paul Motian Trio. The composer Gavin Bryars, for instance (best known for Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet) wrote a piece for guitar & string trio (led by Alex Balanescu), “After the Requiem”, which has for me perhaps Frisell’s single most moving performance. Mostly it’s written-out, but at the climax, he’s given a simple backdrop of swelling chords from the strings, over which he improvises a series of distorted sweeps. It’s quite literally cathartic–the subject of the piece is the death of a friend of Bryars’ in the Lockerbie air disaster, & the healing process after it (it was composed “after” writing a requiem for the friend–the “Cadman Requiem”).
You might find Frisell’s Live album on Gramavision interesting, as it covers a lot of the material from Where in the World but in much looser, more abrasively inventive form. It’s only adequate in terms of recording quality, but it’s one of the discs of his I do listen to most. It has a particularly mournful & effective version of “Strange Meeting”. Appropriately, I suppose, since I assume the title’s a reference to Wilfred Owen’s WWI poem.