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On July 2nd, 1999 I was one of a tri-generational trio of good friends and guitar geeks that made the drive from Ottawa to Montreal to see Bill Frisell play guitar. It was part of the Montreal jazz festival, an indoor ticketed show starring the late Paul Motian (1931-2011) but with much respect to the extraordinary drummer and saxophonist Joe Lovano (who was also on the gig), we were all there for Frisell, 100%. And he did not disappoint.
I was there with Wayne, a remarkable jazz-fusion player whom I had met about a half-dozen years earlier when he became my guitar instructor during the last two years of my music degree. And with us was young Nick, a close friend of a close friend whom I’d met when he stayed at my place during his weekend-long audition for Carleton’s music department the year before. Nick was a super-nice guy with a great musical feel and when he played the guitar he had a seemingly innate ability to sound uncannily like Bill Frisell, something I and presumably many others find utterly impossible to do. Nick even had a Bixby dropped into his Telecaster, which – now that I think about it – doesn’t seem very innate after all.
I suppose if any of us would have had even a smidgen of appreciation for Paul Motian’s illustrious career playing with Kieth Jarrett or as a member of the Bill Evans Trio it would have been Wayne, elder musical statesman that his is/was/is amongst we three. Heck, Wayne was probably even aware that Motian, Lovano, and Frisell had been playing together as a bebop trio for years but I sure wasn’t, and I doubt Nick was either. But we found out in a hurry.
The show was at a big century-old soft-seat theatre in Montreal called Monument-National that I don’t think I’ve been to before or since. This was…let’s see now…flip flip flip…egad…can it be? It looks like this was the first time I ever saw Bill Frisell. Can that possibly be real? Flip flip flip…geez, it seems to be true. It’s so, so weird that I don’t recall this as my first Bill Frisell experience but I suppose it makes sense. This was the only time I ever saw Bill Frisell play as a sideman to someone else but more importantly, for the entire concert Bill played in a style that was so unlike his usual sound as to be completely unrecognizable.
One thing about Frisell’s playing: it’s slow. Scour any of his recordings for flairs of speed or flashy guitar moments and you will come up empty-handed. A Bill Frisell guitar line is thoughtful, angular, surprising, and clever – all of these things all the time – but never fast and never flashy.
However bebop is, by its very definition, fast and flashy. Always and exclusively.
And while Bill played nothing like Frisell the three of us spent the concert enthralled. Any hint of disappointment I might have felt was instantly transformed into the thrill of discovering that my slo-mo musical hero played that way by choice! To think that he was easily able to rip up and down the neck on par with the widdliest of the widdlers and he didn’t?!?! Well, that made him just that much more heroic.
And his super-speedy chromatic sixteenth-note sonic assault allowed me to throw some of my attention over to the other two guys, who were both rather fantastic. I can picture Motian clear as day in my mind, up there churning out endless streams of consciousness in compound-time with Lovano on the far side of the stage jumping registers like an Olympic hurdler and sounding every bit like an entire flock of gloriously squawking geese.
A final memory is Bill Frisell cheekily flipping his guitar around as he took his bow at the end of the concert, revealing a Playboy centrefold that was taped, glued, or laminated onto the back of the instrument. Which didn’t really fit in with my perception of him either.
A mere six weeks later I would see Bill Frisell playing in Ottawa at Barrymore’s, where Bill led his very own band through much of his awesome Gone, Just Like a Train album. I’m not going to bother checking, but I’d bet dollars to doughnuts that in that ticket story I mistakenly describe it as my first Bill Frisell show, because that’s sure how I remember it. And in a way it was. For it turns out that Bill Frisell can turn his own style on and off, and when I saw him at this show with Paul Motian he had it turned off.
Or versa-vice.
Todd Man Out 