Produced by Lee Townsend
Bill Frisell – guitar
Jenny Scheinman – violin
Tony Scherr – bass
Greg Leisz – guitars
Kenny Wollesen – drums
All songs by John Lennon except: Across the Universe, Revolution, Nowhere Man, Please Please Me, You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away, Come Together and Julia – written by Lennon and Paul McCartney.
“…this is a glorious hymn to the art of playing together, of which Lennon would surely approve.” – The Independent / by Nick Coleman
“All We Are Saying… may be Frisell’s closest thing to a rock record but, informed by years of improvisational experimentation‹melodically, harmonically and texturally‹it’s an album that simply couldn’t have been made by anyone else.” – All About Jazz / by John Kelman
REVIEWS
Mr. Frisell’s album represents a labor of love …. an unmistakable sound, an identifiable style …. a great deal of sensitivity and artful restraint …. this music makes up a substantial part of his DNA…. The album’s superior stretch takes up what would be Side B of the LP with a beautifully lilting “Julia” and a starkly tender “Woman” … Some of the band’s most soulful playing comes on “Beautiful Boy” … And things get powerfully ethereal on the closing track, “Give Peace a Chance,” which gave the album its title phrase and, one suspects, its implicit agenda. – Nate Chinen, New York Times
Frisell really gets John Lennon ‹ the heartbreaking tenderness and pain of the family songs, Lennon’s universalist stretch, the yearning for a better world, and the tough, angry rocker who snarled “Revolution” and funkily demanded everyone “Come Together”. Frisell and band render their material not through jazz improv but with warm and loosely intertwining string textures that swarm and tumble, moving deftly through jangly joy, inky fear and slowcore declamation. What a legacy Lennon left us. How lucky we are to have Frisell to tell us about it. – Paul DeBarros, Seattle Times
The guitarist Bill Frisell applies his golden-hued, rustic-cosmopolitan vision to the songs of John Lennon on “All We Are Saying,” his latest postcard from an elusive, idealized America. His band — Jenny Scheinman on violin, Greg Leisz on guitars, Tony Scherr on bass and Kenny Wollesen on drums — brings as much sensitivity to the anthems as the love songs, and no less twang. – Nate Chinen/NY Times
Downbeat – Editors Picks – October, 2011 All We Are Saying is a proverbial rooftop performance; it’s an intelligent, no-frills presentation of the Lennon catalog, spiked with free-flowing Frisell Americana. The guitarist and company tour pivotal creative landmarks in Lennon’s career, from ragtag materialization of the early Beatles (a true-to-sound “Please Please Me”) to the tumultuous months preceding the band’s fallout. The liquid pace of Frisell’s sweeping delay pushes the disc onward, with texture added by Scheinman’s searing harmonics and Leisz’ dizzying, counter-melodic lap steel. Frisell ventures further from the straight-ahead as he approaches Lennon’s solo years (“Number 9 Dreams” and “Woman”). With a couple of exceptions—“Revolution” breathes crunchy electrified blues, and “Come Together” seethes with brusque Scheinman cuts and muddied garage undertones—this album is fluid and unassuming. For Frisell, it’s a lithe musical dream sequence, offering plenty of experimental space without straying too far. – by Hilary Brown/Downbeat
What luxury to be awash in so many Frisell recordings, especially as he’s tapped such rich musical veins of late. In contrast to the complex intimacies of his recent 858 Quartet release, All We Are Saying is a love song to one of Frisell’s all time heroes, John Lennon. The quintet play the songs with little adornment, allowing those unforgettable tunes to ring through. There’s an elegiac ‘Beautiful Boy’, a swoonful ‘Julia’ but the album is no exercise in nostalgia. For Frisell, Lennon is a living artist, his ambiguities and soul searching, let alone ethical struggles partly reflected in the guitarist’s own constant questing. So ‘Revolution’
crackles and sparks, ‘Come Together’ is decidedly eerie and the darkness of ‘Mother’ isn’t avoided. But it’s the early extraordinary songs, ‘You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away’ and a tear jerking ‘In My Life’ that stay with you long after the CDs slid back into the sleeve. – Andy Robson – November 2011/ Jazzwise