bill frisell, bill frisell music
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This Land - Bill Frisell
Musician (6/94)
...Frisell's music has always been evocative, and the charts he's written [on THIS LAND] attain a new level of polyglot eloquence...Like Ellington's TONE PARALLEL TO HARLEM, these pieces evoke an elaborate emotional weave...
Rolling Stone (9/22/94)
...provides a highly eclectic and picturesque listening experience, colored by a goofball kind of experimentalism...
bill frisell, bill frisell music
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bill frisell, bill frisell music
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Lookout for Hope - Bill Frisell
Gramophone Jazz Good CD Guide
Frisell was always destined to be an unconventional player. His early interests were varied and he tapped into Jimi Hendrix and the creative side of pop. He studied under Mike Gibbs at Berkeley College and came to Europe with the trombonist's big band. There he met Eberhard Weber and in the late seventies and early eighties became something of a house guitarist at ECM. As this CD shows, he has managed to produce a personal synthesis of influences, never forgetting Wes Montgomery, but using the implied power of rock, as well as the texture-conscious sound production of the ECM ethic. In fact the title track demonstrates Frisell nursing rich tonal fluctuations with considerable artistry and showing how he is prepared to get his results by any means available. Performances like Little Brother Bobby and Lonesome have charm rather than depth and in his more clinical moments there is a certain New Age preciousness about his work. He is at his best, as on Remedio's The Beauty or Hackensack, when he rakes the thematic entrails and reminds the listener of the music's dirt road origins. The most important aspect of his playing is that he is now an original; he has made available new techniques and provided ground-rules to promote another generation of guitarists.
bill frisell, bill frisell music
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bill frisell, bill frisell music
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Good Dog, Happy Man - Bill Frisell
Jazziz
Anybody attempting to describe Bill Frisell's latest album in terms of genres is going to end up using a lot of hyphens. The guitarist fits less neatly into most definitions of jazz with every passing year. Despite his music's metamorphosis, his voice has remained utterly distinctive. On his last few albums, Frisell has mined a vein of Heartland music that is almost, but not quite, instrumental country-folk. A good dose of that amalgam remains on Good Dog, Happy Man. A number of tracks, especially the cover of the traditional piece "Shenandoah," with guest guitarist Ry Cooder, mix acoustic picking and shimmering electric-guitar washes in a mellow sort of highbrow new age folk, with enough of Frisell's trademark squiggles and Greg Leisz's slippery steel guitar to keep things interesting. Frisell spices the program with a variety of other stylistic forays. The off-kilter downhome groove and oddball percussive sounds of "Big Shoe" suggest David Lindley and Medeski, Martin & Wood playing a Tom Waits song. "My Buffalo Girl" and "Poem for Eva" have the Midwestern tunefulness of a mid-tempo Pat Metheny ballad, but with soulful organ from Wayne Horvitz. "Cadillac 1959" is a distortion-heavy blues that's the gutsiest track on the disc. Throughout, bassist Viktor Kraus and drummer Jim Keltner provide a solid yet flexible foundation. Regardless of how you categorize it, Good Dog, Happy Man establishes an attractive mood and operates on enough levels of complexity that it's still fresh and appealing after multiple listens. Copyright 1999, Milor Entertainment, Inc.
bill frisell, bill frisell music
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bill frisell, bill frisell music
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Nashville - Bill Frisell
Frisell's made his mark with electronic displays of avant-jazz guitar wonderments. Lately, though, he's been exploring the history of music in America, including composing music to accompany silent films of Buster Keaton and Have a Little Faith, his album that features covers of songs by Bob Dylan, Stephen Foster, Aaron Copeland, Sonny Rollins and Madonna. Nashville is Frisell's take on country music -- more for its high lonesome mood than stomping and boot scooting. With members of Alison Krauss' and Lyle Lovett's bands, as well as vocalist Robin Holcomb, Frisell's guitar quietly and masterfully evokes rather than imitates the keening sound of the pedal steel as well as the spirit and essence of country music. Jeffery Lindholm
bill frisell, bill frisell music
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bill frisell, bill frisell music
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Quartet - Bill Frisell
With his indelible, elastic tone, restless curiosity, and open-eared approach to music beyond the traditional corridors of jazz, guitarist Bill Frisell is among the most prolific and continually surprising improvisers alive. Quartet is built around a typically inventive, typically off-centered Frisell lineup including Ron Miles (trumpet, piccolo trumpet), Eyvind Kang (violin, tuba), and Curtis Fowlkes (trombone) who draw from a sonorous palette. By avoiding a conventional rhythm section and piano, Frisell and his confederates create a group sound with the intimacy of small jazz group while tapping the timbres of chamber music; the material (which includes pieces composed for a TV special built around friend Gary Larson's "Far Side" cartoons) is equally beyond category. --Sam Sutherland
bill frisell, bill frisell music
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bill frisell, bill frisell music
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Is That You? - Bill Frisell
Listening to guitar virtuoso Bill Frisell, it's always difficult to understand why his talents aren't harnessed more often by major rock bands. Although nominally a jazzer, his mastery of styles is such that Jimi Hendrix or Robert Fripp are as much in evidence as Wes Montgomery or Jim Hall but, in blending those influences, Bill Frisell creates something very distinctively his own. Like so many jazz players, he ...plays in clever time signatures, speeding up, slowing down, juxtaposing unlikely textures. When he picks clean and pure, as on the unaccompanied Rag, his melodic crispness is a delight. Then, treating the familiar tune of Days Of Wine And Roses as a caterpillar, he transforms it into a psychedelic jazz butterfly. Bill Frisell is an original who will amply reward patient listening... --Johnny Black
bill frisell, bill frisell music
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bill frisell, bill frisell music
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In Line - Bill Frisell
A collection of some of Bill's best songs while he was on the ECM label.
bill frisell, bill frisell music
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bill frisell, bill frisell music
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Go West: Music for the Films of Buster Keaton - Bill Frisell
Vibe (10/95)
...Frisell moves through a series of jubilant, juicy, bluesy, and brittle mood pieces that well capture Keaton's virile, alienated and confused persona. If we identify what Led Zeppelin did as heavy metal, then...Frisell has to be considered a dealer in precious metals...
bill frisell, bill frisell music
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