![]() (You could say the same for his jazz playing, but jazz guitar has more forebears who placed elegance above technical flash.) He focused on sonics, the liquid give-and-take between himself and Leisz, and his savvy negotiation of harmonic and rhythmic contours. But his take on this chopsy repertoire-Jimmy Bryant and Speedy West surf instrumentals, with their emphasis on rapid-fire picking-was expectedly genteel. He used his trusted combination of Fender Telecaster-style ax, Fender tube combo amp and delay and looping effects to achieve his melancholy, art-house version of surf and vintage Nashville tone. He clearly relishes the electric guitar as a marvel of American technology. This program and its related album, to be released in October, made plainer than usual the idea that Frisell is a guitar fanatic but doesn’t subscribe to the many tropes that plague the instrument. ![]() Pete Seeger’s “Turn! Turn! Turn!” skewed harder toward Nashville than the Byrds did the Beach Boys’ “In My Room” made you wonder why the Lennon-McCartney book has become standard jazz source material but Brian Wilson’s songs have not and Frisell’s “Shortest Day” offered the sort of bittersweet earworm motif you want to hear again as soon as it ends. (It’s a kind of anti-showmanship that works better in the Village Vanguard than in a concert hall, and Frisell owned up to that fact with a joke: “I hope you don’t mind looking at my rear end.”)įrisell is a melodist first and foremost, and a lot about this set was strikingly beautiful. Even the action onstage dipped in the direction of a communicative jazz band, with Frisell facing and lurching toward his rhythm section. To put it more directly, this was a rock ‘n’ roll gig executed with the temperament and group dynamic of postbop.īecause the repertoire was so familiar, you couldn’t help but think of the original arrangements, and then of how Frisell and company were artfully remaking them: turning streamlined melodies into polyphony on the frontline, reinventing standard backbeats with swing and groove and space. But other résumé bullets would have been equally beneficial in making sense of the following 90 minutes: that Frisell performed in one of jazz’s most deeply interactive trios, with Paul Motian and Joe Lovano, for three decades or that he helped to redefine the jazz guitar as a textural instrument while a go-to player for ECM Records. The music he played, by the Beach Boys, Duane Eddy, the Chantays, Link Wray and others, is the stuff of childhood innocence for the Vietnam generation-the beach-party calm before the storm of cultural explosions that would transform America in the second half of the ’60s. To know that Frisell is a baby-boomer was important, yes. ![]() Accompanying Frisell were Greg Leisz on pedal steel and guitar, Tony Scherr on upright and electric basses and Kenny Wollesen on drums and vibraphone-longtime collaborators with an especially developed understanding of the leader’s style-melding, chamber-like take on American music. “Does it help to let you know I was born in 1951?” asked Bill Frisell last Friday at Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Appel Room, before easing into the second show of “Guitar in the Space Age,” a program of the postwar country, blues and rock ‘n’ roll that inspired him as a boy.
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