California Dreaming Adds Sweep to Jazz
Richard Perry/The New York Times
By NATE CHINEN
Published: June 23, 2013
Bill Frisell has had a lot of practice putting high concept into a humble package. Long hailed as one of the most distinctive and original improvising guitarists of our time, he has also earned a reputation — over the last 30 years, and especially within the last 10 or so — for teasing out thematic connections with his music.
The tenor of his work, and the slant of his signature, has kept Mr. Frisell, 62, at the forefront of a hybrid you might call jazz Americana. His style suggests a folklike vernacular that finds purchase in country, Protestant hymns, jazz and blues. He has drawn recent, long-form inspiration from the rural portrait photography of Mike Disfarmer and the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927. This spring at SFJazz, he performed multimedia tributes to Allen Ginsberg and Hunter S. Thompson.
“Big Sur” (OKeh), his gorgeously evocative new album, fits squarely into this portfolio, with a welcome twist. As the title implies, it’s about the rugged sweep of California coastline that runs south of the Monterey Peninsula, with a sound that often courts the majestic. But the album doesn’t strike a dialogue with Henry Miller or Jack Kerouac, who each put a claim on the region. That literary filter would be true to Mr. Frisell’s established pattern of inquiry, maybe even a little too on-the-nose.
What “Big Sur” represents is at once simpler and more ambitious. Commissioned by the Monterey Jazz Festival, where it had its premiere last year, this suitelike work attempts to evoke an experience, a sense of place. Mr. Frisell composed all the music in seclusion on a sprawling property owned by the Big Sur Land Trust, during a 10-day residency there. Most of the album’s 19 tracks bear titles seemingly copied out of a pocket notebook: “On the Lookout,” “A Good Spot,” “The Animals.”
The sound of these pieces convincingly suggests a blush of discovery bound by larger purpose. The tunes don’t become a tasteful blur, like those on “Disfarmer,” from 2009. They don’t form a crowded canvas of disconnected ideas, as on “History, Mystery,” from the previous year. They aren’t experiments in texture, like so much of “The Intercontinentals” and “Unspeakable,” from roughly a decade ago. (Each of those albums, released on Nonesuch, has been justly acclaimed.)
What’s striking about “Big Sur” is its determined strength of melody, along with its shrewd marshaling of resources. It merges two of Mr. Frisell’s recent bands: his 858 Quartet, essentially a string ensemble, and Beautiful Dreamers, a hardier postbop trio. So along with its leader, “Big Sur” features the violist Eyvind Kang, the violinist Jenny Scheinman, the cellist Hank Roberts and the drummer Rudy Royston: musicians with a strong feeling for Mr. Frisell’s language.
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