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I’ve seen the wonderful Bill Frisell play live quite a few times, many of them in Ottawa. Each show was unique, featuring different sidemen covering a wide variety of material so they don’t all blend into one another in my memory like a run of Phish or Tragically Hip shows might. That said, I can’t recall whether or not it was at this show on June 27th, 2012 that I saw calm, cool Bill Frisell’s Dr. Jekyll briefly turn into Mr. Hyde.
It was certainly in the NAC Studio; that I remember for certain. Frisell strolled onto the stage like a Zen master practising walking meditation and took a seat amid his small NASA-like setup of amplifiers and electronics. As he plugged in his guitar and started laying down several quiet, transcendent loops to play over the jazz festival’s official photographer hovered around him, noisily clicking dozens of close-up shots from just a few feet away. It was a major distraction for me in the audience, and though Bill Frisell tried his best to ignore the shutterbuggery it was obviously bothering him as well.
Soon enough Bill addressed the elephant in the room and politely asked the pachyderm to please stop clicking pictures, going on to explain that he was trying to set up a mood that was been trampled by the camera noise. The photographer took a seat in the corner in the front row as Frisell restarted the show.
And amazingly, the guy kept taking pictures from his seat.
After thirty seconds or so the quiet jazz giant turned into a jazz monster, abruptly turning towards the offending photographer and making an angry face, holding his hands held up to the sides of his head menacingly.
“Grrrrrr!” The transformation was beginning.
Of course Frisell’s burst made for a great photo-op and only encouraged the photographer, who kept madly clicking away. I (and I assume the rest of the audience) sat quietly mortified at this shmuck’s chutzpah, but being Canadian and all it was the sitting quietly part that stood out, as we all tried to hide our discomfort.
Suddenly: “Why don’t you get the f*** out of here!” roared Frisell.
Wow. We were all a bit taken aback. It was like we just saw Norman Rockwell draw a dirty picture or something. But it did the trick; I don’t remember anything more from the photographer after that.
As for the show itself, as the ticket suggests it was an evening of the sublime – one of the world’s most interesting, spacious guitar players playing some of the greatest pop songs ever written, all from the pen of the unfortunately-not-immortal John Lennon. It was a perfect pairing; the simple beauty of John Lennon’s melodies filtered through Frisell’s no-BS/every-note-counts-especially-the-one’s-I’m-not-playing approach laid bare both the heart of the songs and the soul of the player. It was two hours of bliss.
Later in the show Frisell’s Dr. Jekyll made an apology to the (probably now-absent) photographer. “I really shouldn’t have said that and I’m sorry,” said the good doctor, before a touch of Hyde added something along the lines of “No matter how f***ing annoying that guy was.”
As mentioned, this might not have been the show where any of this happened, and if that’s the case I would have wrote instead about how Bill Frisell’s guitar playing is like a spider web. With laser-like precision Frisell presents a series of seemingly unconnected simplistic lines that take surprising hair-turns on a dime, and it takes a bit of a step back to see how much order and sense there is in all those unified jagged lines. What starts as a simple, almost imperceptible line is actually an anchor that will in time hold a massive, well-ordered structure.
But this was likely that show so I don’t have to really get into all of that.
Todd Man Out 