Bill Frisell: In Jazz Country

Bill Frisell is the Gary Larson of jazz guitar -- the more you think about what he plays, the stranger it seems. Last year, the jazz maverick's Quartet album on Nonesuch was a deadpan yet surreal blend of country and jazz influences played by a telepathically tight quartet who blurred the distinction between soloist and ensemble with a subtle, effortless grace. So when Frisell brought trumpeter Ron Miles, trombonist Curtis Fowlkes, and violinist Eyvind Kang with him to Johnny D's a week ago Monday, the question was could they sustain the music's fragile charm live. Their first set answered with an emphatic yes.

They opened with a new arrangement of "Throughout," a tune Frisell recorded with Joey Baron and Kermit Driscoll on Live (Gramavision). With no drummer keeping time, everyone collaborated in setting a groove. First Frisell and Kang established the tune's lopsided carousel momentum. Then the four players converged on the melody, split it apart, reassembled it, and set up a hypnotic riff that everyone took turns playing around with.

There were few fixed points in the quicksand music -- the ostinatos were freely varied and the timbres continually shaded into different hues. After a deliberately paced solo from Miles that left spaces for the band to color and fill in, the trumpet and trombone dialogued in split tones and traded playful little jabbing notes and teasing snorts. Slowly working the groove into another shape, they flowed into a new, untitled Frisell tune that posed guitar and violin in a country-hoedown fever against the jazzy New Orleans growls of trumpet and trombone. Kang moved to the foreground (or the band faded into the background, take your pick) for a solo that mixed country-fiddle chicken clucks and train-wheel clatters with bebop lines.

A tune from Quartet, "Bacon Bunch," with a melody that wobbles like tipsy cartoon mice, changed the mood drastically. Again ensemble intricacies were the highlight, with Frisell at his deadpan Buster Keaton best, placing funky little fragments of melody just off center to give the rhythm a slight lurching quality, or controlling the attack and decay of his notes to alter the music's density and texture. Then Frisell's sour harmonies and melting guitar notes turned "The Days of Wine and Roses" into an exercise in good-natured alienation that both Miles and Fowlkes countered with tender soloing.

Frisell's unaccompanied introduction to "Egg Radio," another tune from the album, shyly courted the sweet nostalgic tune with sidelong paraphrases interspersed with bluesy chords and sharply angled lines of wide intervals. As the horns and violin played the naive melody, Frisell subverted his own song with strummed chords that tried to rush the leisurely pace or lines that cut into the ensemble at oblique angles.

They finished the set with an off-the-wall "Seven Come Eleven" that highlighted just how resourceful a band they are. Sidling up to the tune from four different directions, they improvised on the melody like a New Orleans brass band crossed with a Nashville bluegrass group. Fowlkes was sly and mellow in a sinuous duet with Frisell. And Miles and Frisell displayed an uncanny ability to shadow and anticipate each other in a duet that ushered in the final set of collective variations on the Benny Goodman/Charlie Christian standard.

In their careful group balance and emphasis on collective improvisation, Frisell's quartet at times recall the News from Lulu trio he was part of with John Zorn and George Lewis, or maybe a postmodern version of Jimmy Giuffre's "folk jazz" trio with Bob Brookmeyer and Jim Hall. But his use of country influences, New Orleans jazz, old parlor songs, and funk and minimalism, along with his endearing bemusement, continues to mark him as a true original.

-- Ed Hazell