Bill Frisell’s week at the Italian jazz festival
with Tony Scherr and Kenny Wollesen,
the group he considers his ‘home base’
At midnight on the first Sunday of the 2008 Umbria Jazz Festival in
Perugia, an impromptu party was in full swing on the cobblestone
streets outside Teatro Pavone, a horseshoe-shaped, five-tiered
acoustic marvel from 1740. Inside, however, about 250 listeners
paid close attention as the Bill Frisell Trio, with bassist Tony Scherr and drummer Kenny Wollesen, began a six-night run.
Smiling, Frisell touched a pedal with his foot.
Nachtmusik birdsong plinks came forth, resonating
against the old wood facades. For the next several minutes, Frisell followed the sounds, weaving an abstract
web of tone color—whispery one moment, skronky the
next. He inserted electronic sounds into the dialogue
with pedal taps and dial switches. Wollesen scraped his
snare drum, hand-drummed on his hi-hat and stroked a
gong on a tree of little instruments placed next to his
kit. Gradually, a familiar melody emerged. Scherr
inferred a walking bass line, and the tempo began to
coalesce. Then, on a dime, Frisell launched the melody
of Thelonious Monk’s “Misterioso.”
This began a free-associative, genre-spanning suite,
each declarative melody transitioning into another—
“Moon River,” “A Change Is Gonna Come,” “You Are
My Sunshine,” Monk’s “Jackie-ing,” Charlie
Christian’s “Benny’s Bugle,” Boubacar Traoré’s “Baba
Drame” and Lee Konitz’s “Subconscious-Lee.”
Seemingly able to call up guitar dialects ranging from
Jimi Hendrix to Mali to Charlie Christian at a
moment’s notice, Frisell went for equilateral triangle
dialogue, feeding information to and drawing it from
Scherr and Wollesen. The band displayed implacable
patience, grabbing sounds, constructing lines and creating musical flow from the environment.
Six hours earlier on the same stage, Pat Martino had
played the third concert of a parallel 10-night engagement, leading his quartet through a sparkling seventune set. Dressed in a crisp white shirt, black vest and
pressed black pants, barely moving a muscle, Martino
spun out high-degree-of-difficulty declamations, each a
little sculpture of its own, marked by flawless articulation, an unfailingly plush tone, attention to melody and
an enviable sense of form. He tore through the
swingers and created high drama on the ballads; it was
hard to determine whether the solos were set pieces or
spontaneous inventions.
Throughout the week in July, the juxtaposition of
these two—Frisell a master of space and implication,
Martino determined on every tune to display his efflorescent gifts—was a fascinating programming subplot.
“You wouldn’t know it from listening to what I do
now, but I’ve listened to Pat Martino a lot, and at one
time I was maybe trying to do that,” Frisell said the day
after his opening set. Sitting in the back of the dining
area of the Rosetta Hotel, Frisell wore a white T-shirt,
paisley shorts, white Converse high-tops and horizontally striped socks in bright colors.
“I was checking Pat out yesterday, trying to unravel
this mysterious stuff he’s doing, and it blows my
mind,” he said. “John McLaughlin was another hero.
Day-in, day-out, I tried to play like him, and I couldn’t come
anywhere close. I saw a concert with Shakti in the early ’70s,
heard this incredible stuff coming out and it was this moment of
despair. I realized I’d never be able to do that. I wanted to quit.
Then the next moment it was like, ‘Thank God that’s over with;
now I’ll deal with what I’ve got.’”
Frisell noted the spontaneous quality of the previous
evening’s concert. “It wasn’t planned,” he said. “My mom died
a few weeks ago, and I had to miss a bunch of gigs, so I hadn’t
been playing. I was feeling, ‘Here I am—now I’m back with my
buddies and I want to play, but my hands are like ... I haven’t
been playing my guitar much. So I thought, ‘I just want to make
a sound and see what it sounds like.’”
Frisell has several bands, and works on myriad projects. But
he regards the trio with Scherr and Wollesen—which first convened for a 1999 week at the Village Vanguard and performs on
Unspeakable, East/West and the new History, Mystery
(Nonesuch)—as “home base.”
“I’ve listened to thousands of records with Ron Carter,”
Frisell said, “but when I stand there and play a chord, and
he plays some note I’m not expecting, my mind has been
obliterated.”
He broke off the sentence with a laugh. “You want to stay up
in that thing. I want my mind to be blown. By the time Tony
and Kenny came along, I’d been listening to a lot of music I
hadn’t heard much before—songs by Hank Williams, Roscoe
Holcomb and Doc Boggs. It wasn’t just about I want to play a
Monk tune or a Lee Konitz tune, or I want to write my own
tunes. I was also trying to remember where I come from—
thinking about a Bob Dylan song when I was a kid, playing this
Lovin’ Spoonful song when I was 16. Being honest about what
got me playing.
“Both Kenny and Tony are like my teachers,” he continued.
“In so many areas I want to go into, it’s like they know 20,000
times more than I do. Last night, as an encore, we played this
Ron Carter song ‘Mood.’ Tony knows 20 different versions,
and any other song I’d ask him to play. He’s an awesome guitar
player and also a singer—he knows the words, too. When I discovered Roscoe Holcomb, Kenny went, ‘I got that record when
I was 12.’ I’ve put myself in this amazing situation where they
can challenge me. But at the same time they respect me. They
just play, and they’re not intimidating. Like I said, they blow
my mind.”
Bill accepts the way people play, and plays with who they are, rather than with who they’re supposed to be,” Scherr said the morning after a midnight trio set. The clear sky afforded a spectacular view of the Tiber River Valley from the terrace outside Hotel Brufani Palace, the festival’s nerve center. “He’s constantly open to anything he hears. There’s no preconception of what somebody is supposed to know or not. “I didn’t grow up hearing jazz,” Scherr continued. “When I was around 14, I met a guy who introduced me to Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Waters. We’d play what people think of as a standard, a song by the Animals, then turn off the lights and play free. It all lived in the same room—I never thought about the difference between genres. I recognize that in common with Bill, because Bill seems to just hear a song—it doesn’t matter if George Jones or Billie Holiday sang it. He writes beautiful, classic songs, too, with melodies that go around in my head. When it comes down to it, there’s just great songs, great melodies, and people want to interpret them, be themselves and have a language with the people they play with.” In the ’80s Scherr, now 43, went on the road with Woody Herman. In the ’90s he played numerous jazz gigs on bass, joined the last edition of the Lounge Lizards, played with Maria Schneider and joined Wollesen in Steven Bernstein’s Sex Mob. “Maria started asking me, ‘Have you played a lot of rock music or something?’” he laughed. He spoke in a deliberate baritone perhaps an octave lower than the gravelly tenor he displays on his new release, Twist In The Wind (Smells Like), on which he sings 13 songs, including 10 with his own lyrics. “In Sex Mob, I realized how I actually hear the bass. We went through Seattle and Bill came to the gig. He called me soon after and we started playing. I’m glad it didn’t happen until I had some idea of what I sound like. “I had been a fan of Bill’s music for a long time, so I had some idea of who he was and what his language is about,” he continued. “It was comfortable to hear this guy who had his own voice on guitar. An enormous part of what he does is sophisticated, much more complex than I would understand—though I’ve heard him do it for years, so I might be able to hear something that goes with it. The simpler part that I do understand comes from the guitar language I know. Bill reminds me to be more open, to wait and surrender to what actually happens, rather than thinking I know already. I used to think I knew. Now I’m sure that I don’t.” About a half-hour later, Wollesen strolled through Perugia’s narrow streets, past pasticcerias, pizzerias, gelato shops and taverns setting up for lunch. He settled in at a café not far from a wall built by Perugia’s original Etruscan settlers as a fortification against invaders. In the distance, the Coolbone Brass Band from New Orleans warmed up for its noontime ballyhoo. “Bill’s rhythm is killing, and he hears everything,” Wollesen said. “His ears are supernatural. Right now, we’re talking at this table, and I hear what you’re saying, but there’s all kinds of sound happening around us. People would think of it as background noise. Bill somehow hears all of it. It’s uncanny. His technique is off the hook, but it’s not fast or speedy. People think that’s what technique is, but it’s not that.
“I’ve never really talked with Bill about
music,” he continued. “He’s never said one
thing to me about what to play. I have to figure it
out on my own. It seems strange, because almost
all the bands I play in, somebody says something about that.”
Wollesen’s associations with the likes of John
Zorn, Butch Morris, Bernstein, Norah Jones and
Sean Lennon lead listeners to peg him as a deep
groover and texture-maker rather than a swinger.
But as a teenager in Santa Cruz, Calif., he played
in a local hardcore jazz unit with saxophonist
Donny McCaslin. He also worked as a janitor at
the Kuumbwa Jazz Workshop to gain free
admission. There, he observed such drum icons
as Elvin Jones, Ed Blackwell, Tony Williams,
Billy Higgins and Motian.
Toward the end of the ’80s, not long after he
turned 20, Wollesen relocated to New York.
“Purely for economic reasons, I made a decision
to take whatever work I could get,” he said.
“Playing in so many different bands, different
worlds—a rock band, bebop band, Zorn or
Butch—you realize that the fundamentals
remain the same. You still have to take care of
business. That means being in the moment when
the music is happening, not projecting something you learned or already knew, or what
somebody told you to play. If you’re still hooked
into some other stuff, you’ve lost it.
“I think about painters,” he continued.
“They’ll spend hours by themselves, but finally
there’s the moment where they put the paint on
the canvas. They spend years getting to that
place. It’s like that with music.”
In November, Frisell’s trio will tour Europe
playing to movies—music from Frisell’s
Buster Keaton and Jim Woodring projects,
and also to a new Bill Morrison film.
“It will take us out of a lot of the things we’re
playing now, force us to deal with a different
batch of music, and push us into another zone,”
Frisell said. “I’m writing music with no parameters. In some ways, having the film boxes you in, but I’ll have to figure out a way to keep it
from being a show, where we do the same thing
every night. The limitations can also push you
out into someplace you’ve never been.”
Frisell, Scherr and Wollesen sat around a
table in the same walled-off area in back of the
Rosetta Hotel dining room, as the kitchen staff
prepared the luncheon buffet. That night, they
would play their fifth concert of the week.
Frisell and Scherr turned the conversation to
qualities described in our one-on-one conversations—mutual intuition, shared language and
trust. Wollesen, feeling awkward at expressing
himself on such intimate matters, listened intently, but said little.
“The time between our gigs always seems
too long, but when we get back together we start
almost beyond where we left off,” Scherr said.
“I’ve always liked being in bands that develop
something together. When people play music
together and travel, personalities come out. A
thematic language—literal language—goes
around the band, a couple of terms that get used
for the entire trip, a running joke or a running
topic. The next trip you find new ones.
Sometimes it gets ridiculous, like that day in
Peekskill when we started playing all the major
tunes minor and all the minor tunes major. It
was so silly, and it had everything to do with
who we are. Those things emerge when you’re
not worried about making mistakes. The music
becomes less precious and opens up—you feel
free to demolish stuff together. ”
Scherr gave an example.
“On a lot of tunes we’ll go through the form,
and although I’m not thinking about it this way
while we’re doing it, it’s like playing a game,”
he said. “For instance, in ‘Keep Your Eyes
Open’ there’s a little melody, a chord, another
little melody and a downbeat. We’ve played that
tune for years, and it’s unbelievable how many
different ways we can play that chord—a snotty
little swipe at it, or a broad, beautiful way of hitting it. Often it’s being open enough to just see
how we’re going to do it, and toss it back and forth. Sometimes it’s as simple as hitting one
note or one chord together on the first beat of the
measure. When I first played with Bill, I paid a
lot of attention to that. Now, that notion has
expanded to trying not to think, just to support
the new thing I hear and not answer the question
before it needs to be answered.”
“What you play can be determined by the
way things bounce around in the room,” Frisell
said. “Every day is different, even in the same
room—the number of people, air and humidity.”
“Bill will start playing a song because something is going on in his life, and usually the lyric
is totally relevant,” Scherr added. “Listening to
him is the same as listening to a person I know
talk, or hearing a singer.”
“In this group, I’m trying to sing the song on
the guitar,” Frisell agreed. He referenced a
2003–’05 engagement as musical director of the
German concert series Century of Song, in
which the trio joined various singers in creating
new arrangements of iconic repertoire.
“I talked about trying to copy Pat Martino or
John McLaughlin years ago,” he continued.
“Now it’s more about I’m trying to copy Aretha
Franklin, Sam Cooke or Hank Williams. We’ve
played ‘Lovesick Blues’ a couple of times and
I’m playing what I got from trying to get even
these little nodal things he does with his voice,
which is impossible.”
“Bill’s got the meaning of the tune, too,”
Scherr said. “Well, there is no one meaning for
any tune. We played ‘A Hard Rain’s Gonna
Fall’ a bunch of different ways. But I always feel
that tune means whatever it means that day, and
that’s where it’s living. It’s got a lot of room to
be played.”
Lunch was ready, so it was time to clear out
and prepare for the evening’s concert. “None of
this is secret,” Frisell said. “But it’s this weird
thing we don’t talk about. Playing is as close as
you can get to another human being. I don’t
think whatever we’ve tried to say will break
anything, but it’s not remotely close to what’s
happening as we’re doing it.” DB
ELECTRIC SOUND PAINTINGS
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| JIMMY KATZ |
consultado: 09.04.2019
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