Sun is streaming in through
the window on a fine spring morning, the Papers have just been
delivered, fresh coffee is brewing and there's a new Bill Frisell
album on the CD player. It doesn't get much better than this.
Frisell is a wonderfully talented and skilled jazz guitarist,
but his appeal goes deeper and wider than mere jazz brilliance.
His tone infiltrates the environment and catches your ear;
it's a sound that can contain good humour, or melancholy, or
nostalgia, yet still be utterly fresh and un-cliched, and it's
unquestionably an adult taste: complex, rich, full of layers.
Even when he plays the simplest of tunes, such as "Pretty Flowers Were Made for Blooming
or Where Do We Go?", the touch and timbre adds a dimension
of experience and authority that few musicians deliver with such
consistency. Blues Dream is a suite of pieces for seven-piece
band originally commissioned for the unerringly hip Walker Art
Centre in Minneapolis. Most of the musicians have played with
Frisell at different times in his career, but it's the first
time he's used this particular line-up. The back line comprises
double bassist David Piltch and Sex Mob drummer Kenny Wollesen
(who accompanied Frisell in his recent UK appearance during the
London Jazz Festival). At the front is steel guitarist Greg Leisz
plus three horns: trumpeter Ron Miles, trombonist Curtis Fowlkes
(who both played on Frisell's innovative Quartet album) and saxophonist
Billy Drewes. The reunion element give Blues Dream a
slight feeling of a retrospective, though the material is all
new, and all Frisell's. There's a hint of his witty and empathetic
music for silent Buster Keaton comedies such as The High
Sign and Go West, which used his trio with Kermit
Driscoll and drummer Joey Baron to such good effect. Wollesen
has something of Baron's hyperactive attention to detail, but
on numbers such as "Where Do We Go?" and "Outlaws" he
and Piltch seem just as happy generating a groove so spacious
you could drive a pick-up truck between its snare beats.
Frisell's way of voicing the front line is as unconventional
and logical as his guitar playing - so odd and off-kilter that
you couldn't imagine it any other way. Listen to the opening
of Greg Leisz (Frisell, like Miles Davis and Carla Bley, has
a habit of giving songs the names of real people, from Jimmy
Carter to Ron Carter). The horns blend in a kind of Mingus-meets-Stax
manner that means you can hear individual sounds quite clearly
within a blurry ensemble.
Ron Miles, a distinctive
trumpet player who has made a couple of strong albums under
his own name, takes the lead in the two versions of the title
track and the horns-only Fifty Years. Jazz Passenger Fowlkes
shines in Soul Merchant and Drewes wails decoratively on "Pretty Flowers." Leisz
is a strong foil for Frisell, soaring like an eagle on "Pretty
Stars Were Made to Shine" and diving back to country earth
for "Slow Dance" and the big-boned "Where Do
We Go?."
Sometimes the ensemble achieves a kind of orchestral
grandeur, reminiscent of the line-up that had such fun and games
with Ives, Copland and Dylan on Frisell's album Have a Little
Faith. And at other times they settle down to play the blues,
as on "Things Will Never Be the Same." In case things
get a little too normal, Frisell can always be relied upon to
weird things up again by throwing in a few guitar loops - atonal,
asynchronous and completely A-OK. John L Walters,
The Guardian (London) April 13, 2001
Though he is commonly pigeonholed
as a "jazz" guitarist
because he is a superb improviser, Bill Frisell defies easy categorization.
The incredibly prolific musician's last few CDs have been ruminations
on various traditional American styles - mostly country and folk. Blues
Dream continues in that vein, but it is by far the most
complex and fascinating of these explorations; in fact, I'm going
to go out on a limb and suggest it is Frisell's best album ever.
Fronting a septet that includes master slide guitarist Greg Leisz,
bassist David Piltch, drummer Kenny Wollesen, trumpeter Ron Miles,
alto saxophonist Billy Drewes and trombonist Curtis Fowlkes,
Frisell nimbly travels through a wide assortment of styles, from
numbers that sound like they're being played by the ghosts of
turn-of-the-century New Orleans horn players, to deep country
blues, to post-Bitches Brew abstractions. It's all soaked in
tradition, yet filtered through a modern sensibility. The combination
of Frisell's clean picking and Leisz's always tasteful accompaniment
on everything from pedal steel to Scheerhorn resonator guitar
is absolutely beautiful, and the horn players are always integrated
into the sound in such interesting and unpredictable ways. A
rich, eclectic masterpiece." - Blair Jackson,
Mix Magazine (Cool Spins - The Mix Staff Members Pick Their Current
Favorites)
"For those who have
been wondering where Mr. Bill's musical wanderings would lead
him in the wake of his first solo CD, Ghost Town, Blues Dream provides the
ambitious answer. Nearly all Frisell's fascinations are here:
the pastoralism of Have a Little Faith, a Nashville
tinge, and the cinematic sounds of Quartet. There's
also the electronic loop atmospheres of his ECM and early Elektra
years and the alternating Ellingtonian and Salvation Army horns
of his quintet period. All of this melded into 18 new compositions
commissioned by the Walker Arts Center."
"A textural richness comes courtesy of Greg
Leisz's various guitars backing Frisell's own guitar and a stunning
integration of three horns: Curtis Fowlkes's trombone, Ron Miles's
trumpet, and Billy Drewes's saxophones. As you listen to this
string of broad-shouldered pieces, tributes to greats like Ron
Carter, and strangely blues-inflected soundscapes, it's apparent
that the solos of Ghost Town can operate as a sort of sketch
or "cartoon" for this, the full painting; or a short
that is then expanded into a feature. Frisell's career is taking
on the aspect of a well-crafted movie or novel that explores
different story lines before bringing them together for the finale
(and this might be the prelude to the finale)." - Michael
Ross, Amazon.com
