Jazz Articles about Bill Frisell

Bill Frisell: Hemispheres & The Stars Are All New Songs, Vol. 1

by Kurt Gottschalk
May 9, 2009

Jim Hall & Bill Frisell with Scott Colley & Joey Baron Hemispheres ArtistShare 2008 Jakob Bro The Stars Are All New Songs, Vol. 1 Loveland Records 2008 Bill Frisell no doubt sees Hemispheres as a high point in his discography, for a variety of worthy reasons. First and foremost, he made the record with ...

Bill Frisell: The Best of Bill Frisell: Vol. 1 - Folk Songs

by John Kelman
February 28, 2009

Despite decidedly left-of-center beginnings--on his own ECM discs Rambler (1985) and Lookout for Hope (1988), and in collaboration with artists including Jan Garbarek and John Zorn--guitarist Bill Frisell has always been a melodist at heart. Even at his most outré--his oblique yet stunningly constructed solo on “Next Love," from clarinetist Don Byron's minor classic, Tuskegee Experiment (Elektra/Nonesuch, 1992), an ideal example--there's always been an imbued lyricism.

Frisell's personal approach to Americana music--beginning in earnest with Nonesuch ...

Bill Frisell: The Best of Bill Frisell: Vol. 1 - Folk Songs

by Chris May
February 18, 2009

In Robert Reisner's biographical scrapbook, Bird: The Legend of Charlie Parker (Quartet Books, 1988), one of the contributors tells how Parker, with a saxophone strung round his neck and a gorilla on his back, employed a ruse to clear a Manhattan nightclub of his fans, in order to facilitate the entrance of others waiting in line outside. (Parker was taking a percentage of each ticket sale, so the greater the club's throughput, the greater his take for the night). Every ...

Bill Frisell at the Iron Horse in Northampton, MA

by Lyn Horton
January 24, 2009

Bill Frisell Iron Horse Northampton, Massachusetts July 13, 2009

When performing alone, a musician has to work really hard, since the sound produced cannot be interwoven within the sounds other band members create. The soloist is virtually right out there in the same space as the audience. The musician's vulnerability, in turn, is unmistakable. Combine all that with the personality transmitted in the music, occasionally through the words of the performer, and there ...

Bill Frisell: History, Mystery

by Matthew Miller
September 14, 2008

For an artist rooted in sound and atmosphere, change occurs, more often than not, through Re-contextualization. Miles Davis embodied this over a career of brilliant juxtapositions and, in this way, Bill Frisell is his closest contemporary. The 58 year-old guitarist chooses collaborators carefully, employing them as foils to revolve around the swirling gravitation of his haunting, twang-inflected telecaster. This is the only way to reconcile the newness inherent in History, Mystery. The collaborators are the same; the ...

Bill Frisell: History, Mystery

by John Kelman
June 13, 2008

While guitarist Bill Frisell has continued to shape his uniquely skewed confluence of musical styles, it's been too long since he weighed in heavily on the compositional side. In recent years, the writing has most often served the playing, largely providing a context around which the guitarist and various-sized groups can explore, expand and mine. That's by no means a bad thing, and has resulted in some fine albums including Bill Frisell, Ron Carter, Paul Motian (Nonesuch, 2006) and East/West ...

Bill Frisell: All Hat

by Ian Patterson
June 2, 2008

The problem with attempting to define Americana is that it is an all-encompassing term culturally speaking. As far as music goes, Americana runs the gamut from the Grateful Dead to Willie Nelson and just about everything in between. Equally, the music of guitarist Bill Frisell is difficult to describe without embarking on a short essay, and perhaps because of his eclecticism his music defines the essence of Americana as well as any and better than most.

This original score for ...