Posted by 
Gosh, I love Bill Frisell.
From the moment I first heard him – it was his amazing Gone Like A Train album – I was hooked. His playing is incessantly laid back and yet undeniably virtuosic. The way he throws scales together into remarkably creative and surprising turns of phrase is only rivalled by his immaculate use of space. The guy plays a rest like nobody’s business.
As a result, Bill Frisell has stamped himself with an incredibly identifiable sound that is impossible to miss. Last year I bought a record by drummer Jerry Granelli and a few moments into my first listen I sprang out of my chair and grabbed the liner notes. I needn’t have moved; it was obvious that Frisell was playing on the album.
It’s not that nobody can play like him; it’s just that nobody does. Or more aptly: those that are skilled enough to be able to sound like Bill Frisell are musician enough to know that that sound belongs to him, and that they should look elsewhere. Case in point: back in my circa-university days I had this friend we called Young Nick (I suspect they don’t call him that anymore). I was hanging out with him right around the time that I first started listening to Frisell and whattya know, within a year or so Young Nick started sounding a whole lot like our Mr. Bill. He even got a Bigsby tremolo bar installed on his Telecaster…just like Bill Frisell.
But Young Nick was skilled enough to know that the Frisell tone was already taken. I must say I was partly mortified when he told me he was going to put down the guitar in favour of the keyboard, but he knew that his musical trip had to take him somewhere other than Friselltown (Pop. 1). And he knew that because he was (is) a good musician.
Miles sounded like Miles, Bonham sounded like Bonham, Elvis sounded like Elvis, and Jaco sounded like Jaco. Their tones were their own, each with a timbre pulled together from their own hard-fought influences and countless hours of lonely hard work and frustrating trail and error. The rest are left to admire it, copy it, and then leave it alone. Once you get to a certain level you realize there’s no worth in sticking with someone else’s path; there’s no cache in copping someone else’s story except to use it to build your own.
So like I say, nobody sounds like Bill Frisell, and I love the way he sounds*. And on June 23rd, 2017 I got to once again love his sounds in person as he made one of his fairly regular stops at the Ottawa Jazz Fest. This time he was in the National Arts Centre’s smaller theatre (where I’ve seen him several times before) and he was accompanied by a bassist named Thomas Morgan. And of course it was breathtakingly brilliant. Bill Frisell is just too good to not be consistently great.
It says in my ticket book that I also saw something called Now This, but I can’t seem to shake any memories of that out of my noggin right now. Could be I loved them, I don’t know. If I hated them I’d probably remember, so I assume that they were at least okay.
I also assume that they were playing in the Late Night tent, and that I used them as background music – chamber music if you will – whilst I stood at the back with a flat beer in a plastic cup, chatting with friends about the great Bill Frisell show we just saw.
Gosh, I love Bill Frisell.
*After meeting Bill Frisell on several occasions I can also testify that he’s never been anything but humble, interested, and approachable. He’s truly a swell guy.
Todd Man Out 