Produced by Lee Townsend
* Released on June 18th, 2013
Bill Frisell – guitar
Jenny Scheinman – violin
Eyvind Kang – viola
Hank Roberts – cello
Rudy Royston – drums
All of the music on this album was written at Glen Deven Ranch in Big Sur, California and performed for the first time at the Monterey Jazz festival, 2012.
All compositions published by Friz-Tone Music/BMI
Recording and Mixing Engineer: Adam Munoz
Mastering Engineer: Greg Calbi
Production Assistance: Adam Blomberg
Recorded and Mixed at Fantasy Studios, Berkeley, Ca Mastered at Sterling Sound, New York
Art Design: Paul Moore
Photography: Monica Frisell
Released by Sony Classical’s OKeh label
Track Listing:
1. The Music of Glen Deven Ranch
2. Sing Together Like a Family
3. A Good Spot
4. Going to California
5. The Big One
6. Somewhere
7. Gather Good Things
8. Cry Alone
9. The Animals
10. Highway 1
11. A Beautiful View
12. Hawks
13. We All Love Neil Young
14. Big Sur
15. On the Lookout
16. Shacked Up
17. Walking Stick (for Jim Cox)
18. Song for Lana Weeks
19. Far Away
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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 for teasing out thematic connections with his music… He has drawn recent, long-form inspiration from the rural portrait photography of Mike Disfarmer and the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927.
Big Sur (OKeh), 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, this suite-like work attempts to evoke an experience, a sense of place… The sound of these pieces convincingly suggests a blush of discovery bound by larger purpose… 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 post-bop trio. So along with its leader, Big Surfeatures 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… it’s not an album that hangs on the guitar playing in general, deriving more purpose from chamber-like actions. The big picture is the point, and as usual, credit is due to Lee Townsend, Mr. Frisell’s longtime producer.
But it’s Mr. Frisell’s fingerprints that are all over this music. ‘A Beautiful View’, with its convergence of Copland-esque grandeur and arpeggiated shimmer, could hardly have come from another source. Likewise with ’Going to California’ and its air of noble austerity. And ‘Shacked Up’ is a slow-drag country waltz that milks the half-step dissonance in its melody, as if Bob Wills were tipping his hat to Thelonious Monk… It’s clear, in any case, that Mr. Frisell has been thinking along these lines almost since the beginning. There’s a reason that Jazz at Lincoln Center had him program a series called “Roots of Americana” for its coming season.”
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* Interview with Bill Frisell about “Big Sur” conducted by Brian Robbins below. Published 6/21/13
As big, bold, quirky, and lovely as its namesake (and birthplace) Bill Frisell’s new Big Sur album is destined to be a classic in the guitarist’s catalog. Frisell has made a career out of defying musical boundaries and shrugging off genre labels; you’ll most likely find his albums under “jazz,” but know that this man can play the blues, pick the grass, twang the boards off the side of the barn, and jam with the trippiest of them. Frisell’s Big Sur – featuring his new “Big Sur Quartet”: violinist Jenny Sheinman; cellist Hank Roberts; Eyvind Kang on viola; and drummer Rudy Royston – is the result of a commission by the Monterey Jazz Festival, which landed Frisell a residency at the 860-acre Glen Deven Ranch in Big Sur, CA. Just the man, a guitar, and his notebooks – in a setting that offered beauty, solitude, and inspiration. We talked with Bill about the experience of having complete freedom to be and to create – with the occasional wild animal thrown into the mix.
Brian Robbins: Bill, when I first heard about this project – before I actually heard the album – I thought you might be doing another project like the one based on Hunter Thompson’s “The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent And Depraved” article.
BF: Oh, yeah … (laughs)
Which concerned me, because as beautiful as Kerouac’s Big Sur is, there’s some serious darkness there …
BF: Oh, I know – I was actually reading it while I was up at Big Sur. It was incredible. Kerouac’s description of his arrival at Big Sur at the beginning of the book was sort of an exaggeration of my own. He was going up there to clean himself up from drinking or whatever; I was going to clean up my brain from … you know … all the chaos around me.But he describes getting there late at night – he was walking from Monterey or wherever he was coming from – and describes this ravine and he runs into a donkey and all this stuff happens. When I went there, it was in the night – the flight was cancelled and I was really late – and I’m driving up this narrow, dark road and I don’t know where I’m going.It was kind of amazing: he just nailed the description. Also, there’s this sort of darker thing about it, too; it’s spectacularly beautiful and spacious … but there’s this underbelly to it, at the same time.
Of all the songs on the album, if I was going to pick one that could be a soundtrack to the Kerouac book, I guess it would be the title track. It seems to capture some of that tension and darkness … and the beauty.
That’s cool. Once I got there and started writing the music, things kind of … (laughs) … I just sort of entered into the music. But being there gave me the space in my head to just write. I wasn’t trying to really capture some picture or anything – I was just sort of … writing music.The very last thing I always do are the titles; I go back and listen to the stuff and say, “Well, this must remind me of something …” (laughter) It’s always like that – the title is sort of an afterthought.
That’s interesting. How much of the music do you think was generated by being at Big Sur, rather than just a result of being isolated like that?
There was this double thing of incredible space and beauty around me, which – of course – affected me, as you say. But even more important was the space in my own mind to just be with myself. That is so rare these days; I didn’t know what time it was; there was no internet; no phone; no TV – none of that stuff. It was just basic follow-through of whatever. There was no pressure at all.And even though I was writing the music for the Monterey Jazz Festival – that’s where we played the music – it was so far into the future that I didn’t feel that deadline thing either.
You had a completely empty canvas to work with.
Exactly. I’ve never had an experience quite like that.
Had the Monterey Jazz Festival done anything like that previously? I know they’d commissioned pieces, certainly, but had they set someone up in an environment like that to write?
I think I might’ve been the guinea pig for that. (laughter) I think they’d been talking about doing it for a while. There’s one song on the album called “Song for Lana Weeks” and she’s the woman who works for the Big Sur Land Trust. Lana and Tim Jackson, who’s the Monterey Jazz Festival’s Artistic Director, have been thinking about this for quite a while. Some people wouldn’t want to go up there and be all by themselves, you know? So they had to find somebody. Tim knew me – and knew me well enough to know that I might be interested … and I definitely was.
Would you go back?
Yeah … for sure! It was like paradise for me.
So, no cellphone; no laptop; no TV. The big question is, what did you take for instruments?
The first time I went – I went twice – was in April of last year for 10 days. And I just had a Collings guitar with me. I always have just one instrument with me at a time. Someday – when I grow up (laughter) – I’ll have roadies and all that stuff. But whatever I can carry with me is what I have.
So, a Collings acoustic?
No, actually it’s a semi-hollowbody electric that’s kind of like a 335 Gibson. I think they call it an I-35.
Oh, sure – I have a Collings mandolin, which is a much better instrument than I’ll ever be a player.
It’s beautiful.Oh, they’re just incredible, aren’t they? I have a Collings dreadnought, too – it’s an amazing instrument.
So you arrived at Big Sur during the night and took in your surroundings the next morning. How long was it before the music showed up; before you started to write?
Well … I think right away. It’s hard to say. I’d just walk around and all day I’d be writing something. It’s almost like drawing or … or …
Sketching?
Exactly. So I’d walk – even without my guitar – out on these trails with a little notebook and try to write down melodies. There were tons of stuff; what ended up on the record or what we did for the gig is just a small part of it. I should go through those notebooks more to see what else is in there.
Maybe there’ll be a Big Sur Volume II
… Could be! (laughs) But that’s kind of the way I write. I accumulate all the little bits; all the raw stuff … and then I go back and try to refine it. There’s not even that much different material on the album, really. There are pieces that are related to each other; or even the same piece played in a different way.
I remember thinking “A Good Spot” and “A Beautiful View” were variations on the same theme … and hearing quotes of various pieces tucked in here and there. It really gives the album a true “suite” feel. I can easily imagine the individual tracks just flowing into each other, if you chose to present them in that manner.
Oh, yeah. In a few weeks we’re going to be touring in Europe and I’m really excited about that. I’m sure the music is going to evolve and change as we play it. We really just did the one gig in Monterey and then we did the record – the music is really still in the early stages.
Am I right that you returned to Glen Deven with the quartet?
Yeah – right before the Monterey performance. That was cool: they could see what I was thinking about. It was a really great way to rehearse for the gig, because instead of just having the notes on the piece of paper, we all had that same experience of being there.
How structured were the arrangements when you presented the songs to those folks?
That’s the thing: with this band, it’s kind of amazing. Everybody’s looking at the same part – sometimes there could be three or four harmony parts or whatever – but they’re very free to choose what they want to do. They’re making these spontaneous orchestration decisions really quickly on their own. Sometimes everybody will be playing the same thing … or someone will switch to a different part … or they’ll turn it around backwards … and that’s what I love about this band. I’ve known everybody for so long and we don’t have to figure it out … it’s not written out as if it was for the “Such-and-such String Quartet” (laughter) where everything has to be a certain way.
I wanted to ask you about Lee Townsend, who produced the album. With a project such as this, it seems to me that a producer has to walk a fine line between maintaining a certain level of control and letting things happen organically.
That’s right. Lee and I have done so many records together … and he knows me well enough that from project to project he’ll change his approach, depending on what the project is. Like when we did the Floratone records together, Lee was really, really deep into actually affecting the whole structure of the music – compositionally and every kind of way. With something like this, it’s more just about the vibe; about trying to make it comfortable for the musicians. Lee knows when to just let it go … when to let it happen.
There are some great producers in the world, but you know in a heartbeat that an album is one of theirs, because they slap their trademark sound all over it. But that’s cool to hear that about Lee – it’s as if he’s improvising along with the rest of you.
That’s true. And Adam Muñoz did an amazing job of recording and mixing, as well. He always does.
How about if we look at a few specific songs on the album? Hopefully, I’ll remember them! (laughter) Fair enough! “Sing Together Like A Family” made me smile. There’s a hybrid Appalachian fiddle tune roaming around in the background.
On that one, I noticed after we recorded it – and this is one of the things that really excites me about this band – the whole intonation and rhythmic thing that we have together. The music gets into this unexplainable place where everybody is always making these tiny adjustments in tune with each other or in time with each other. Even if we’re playing the exact same thing, there’s a sound that starts happening like a … a … a family that sings together! (laughter) I guess that’s what I was thinking about.
There you go.
So even if the music or the parts are set in a certain way, there’s something else that starts happening … and everybody starts adjusting to each other. It’s really exciting.
I think that’s the key to good formation flying.
Yeah, yeah – exactly! That’s an amazing way to describe it … I’m going to use that. That’ll be another title. (laughter)
I’m deeply honored.
But it’s perfect: if you turn the wrong way –
You take out everybody!
Right! (laughter)
“Going To California” has this grand and stately feel to it; but there’s also this ominous thread that runs through the song, as well. Was there some nervousness on your part when you decided you were going to California to stay at Big Sur?
Well, maybe not before the trip – but that first morning I woke up and said, “Wow – this is the most awesome, extraordinary place I’ve ever seen!” I felt so relaxed; just walking around and taking it all in. I ran into the caretaker who lives down the road. He’s an amazing guy; he’s lived there for years and years and knows every inch of the land. We talked for a hour and at the end he says, “Actually if you’re going to go down that trail there, I’d better get you a stick – there are mountain lions here…” And I’m like, “What?” (laughter) He says, “Don’t worry,” but he’s just sort of planted this little seed of this … this … other thing – the dark side. (laughter) So after that, every time I went out, I had this little feeling of being completely by myself, walking down these trails, and thinking something’s going to jump out at me. (laughs) Or one night there was this incredible storm – thunder and lightning and wind – and the electricity went out and it felt like the house was going to blow away. I mean, there’s stuff there that’s … scary, really. It’s not like being in a dark alley in New York in the middle of the night, or whatever – it’s a different sort of scary.
I hear you. And at the same time, we have a song like “The Big One”, which is one big, sunshiny smile. It seems like there had to be at least one let-it-fly surf tune birthed from being in that setting. One of the things that makes that song so neat is the fact that you don’t often get to hear a viola, a cello, and a violin play surf music.
Yeah that was cool. (laughs) I wrote that tune when I was at Big Sur and I started playing it at rehearsal almost as a joke, thinking “We can’t really play this …” But then everybody was like, “Oh no, we’ve got to play that!” (laughter) I wasn’t even sure that I was going to put it on the record, actually. But it does make sense with the whole California thing.
“Cry Alone” is a beautiful piece, but it feels so personal that it’s almost embarrassing. It’s like looking over your shoulder while you’re writing in a journal.
Well … (laughs) Thanks!
I just hope you had no reason to actually cry alone.
No, no! (laughter)
And then there’s “We All Love Neil Young” – which we all do, of course … but what was the inspiration for that?
I don’t know … (laughter) Neil lives not too far from there. I’ve never seen where he lives or anything, but I’ve read books about his ranch and all that. We’d always be talking about “Neil this” or “Neil that” and somehow that song just … I don’t know – it made me think of him.
We talked about a string section playing surf music – then they turn around and launch into the blues of “Shacked Up”.
Yeah – that was so great to do that.
We mentioned Lana Weeks earlier, who has a song named for her. We should probably also mention Jim Cox, who “Walking Stick” is dedicated to.
Jim is the caretaker guy I was telling you about. He carved me a walking stick out of a branch to carry around with me. It was cool.
To fend off the mountain lions. Yeah, yeah – “I’ll take care of ‘em” … with my stick. (laughter)
Bill, thanks so much for taking the time to do this today. I’ve really enjoyed listening to Big Sur – and equally enjoyed talking with you about it.
Thank you – this was fun. And thank you so much for listening; I appreciate it.
* Original article HERE
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BY SEBASTIAN SCOTNEY / LONDON JAZZ NEWS – June 27th, 2013
Big Sur, on California’s Highway One, between San Luis Obispo and Monterey, has a particular place in American culture. It represents a retreat, the antithesis of the seething metropolis. Henry Miller lived there for many years, and once wrote: “Big Sur is the California that men dreamed of years ago, this is the Pacific that Balboa looked at from the Peak of Darien, this is the face of the earth as the Creator intended it to look.”
Half a century after Miller moved on, the area has been spared the ravages of development, and still remains relatively unspoilt. Bill Frisell availed himself of an opportunity offered to him by the Big Sur Land Trust to spend time quietly, alone, at their isolated Glen Deven Ranch, to settle down and to write a composition, for a first performance at the 2012 Monterey Jazz Festival. What emerged from this period is a fascinating nineteen-piece suite. The basic thematic material can often be disarmingly simple, but the whole work – and I would argue that it needs to be seen as an integral composition – is a fascinating, constantly shifting kaleidoscope.
The quintet performing it consists of three string players Jenny Scheinman (violin), Eyvind Kang (viola), Hank Roberts (cello) plus Rudy Royston (drums), and Frisell himself. They perform an ambitiously interlinked and intertwined work, in which Frisell often follows Paul Klee’s simple maxim of “taking a line for a walk,” or – once two parts get going – sets up what Boulez calls “a dog going for a walk around its owner”.
The core vibe of the album is spacious, mesmerically slow, often quiet. The strings play with featherlight bowing, mostly vibrato-less. A simple phrase is stated, absorbed, inevitably repeated. In one piece I counted the same falling melodic line within a fifth occuring no fewer than forty-one times.
Sometimes Frisell’s writing lets the string writing turn from homely apple-pie to deliberately, knowingly sour. As the title track Big Sur progresses, the semitone clashes really start to scrunch, in tantalisingly repeated slo-mo. Gather Good Things has the two upper strings starting unaccompanied, in a world very close to that of the simple Pillow Dances and Wedding Songs of Bartok’s 44 duos for two violins. Then Royston enters, and it turns into a stand-to-attention what-are-we-fighting-for march which could be by Hanns Eisler.
That crisply insistent drumming from Rudy Royston can give a whole range of moods and colours. The gentle dance rhythm of On the Lookout gets ideal ‘alt. country’ propulsion from his rocky backbeat. In Cry Alone, he keeps the slow three going, often with a shimmering cymbal, and with an irregular deep heartbeat from the bass drum.
The Animals, for strings alone, has Roberts progressively slowing the music down with a beguilinging soft single-note cello drone. The final track Far Away has it all: disarmingly simple to start, but developing an immersive cats cradle of counterpoint before returning to calm and innocence, as if a retreat back to rural simplicity can blank out all memory of the sensory overload of the city.
Frisell’s compositional language is confident, personal, heterogeneous, yet clearly all of a piece. It might be best to treat Big Sur like a good Pinot Noir from Bernardus in Carmel, and certainly not attempt – yet – to declare it a vintage, or indeed a masterpiece. But lay it down, keep it in your cellar. The subtleties and the puzzles of Big Sur will be enjoyed for many years.
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BY JUAN RODRIGUEZ / THE MONTREAL GAZETTE – June 27TH, 2013 * An interview with Bill Frisell
MONTREAL – Bill Frisell is on a roll. In the last 2½ years, the perennial poll-winning guitarist has released no less than 10 albums. They’re wildly diverse in scope, theme and genre, yet they all bear his unmistakable tone and his supremely open-minded esthetic and imagination. Nowhere does he spread himself thin. He may well be the most creative and eclectic musician around.
That last sentence may seem presumptuous, but the proof is in the pudding. There is his tender tribute to the songs of John Lennon (All We Are Saying); a duet with Brazilian singer Vinicius Cantuaria (Lagrimas Mexicanas); a trio set of sweetly haunting John Zorn tunes (The Mysteries); two solo recordings (Silent Comedy, wacked out in two hours, and the intensely lyrical Solos: The Jazz Sessions); two quartets (Enfants Terribles, with bebop legend Lee Konitz, and Sign of Life, with his string group), and his latest, the impressionistic Big Sur, commissioned by the Monterey Jazz Festival.
“It’s natural that the music is always happening,” Frisell said over the phone recently. “I’ve been really lucky to just be playing all the time, but what’s unusual is that I’ve been super-lucky in having these opportunities to document it with recordings — and I know I’ve been really lucky in having been supported (by record labels) for so many years (and) I don’t want to take it for granted.”
Frisell speaks in a modest, calm, but almost questioning cadence. He tries so hard to be accurate in relating an idea or event that he interrupts himself, starts another sentence, then stops and revises it, until he has shaped a group of words that he hopes answers your question satisfactorily. You can almost hear the gears of his mind working to avoid pat answers.
When I led off by asking if he enters “an existential state” when performing solo concerts — as he will on Saturday at the jazz festival — he replied, “What does that mean? Let me think. So many things happen — I mean, it’s been such a challenge for me to play by myself. The first time I tried to do it was, boy, 30 years ago or more. My first solo concert, I can’t even begin to tell you how traumatic it was. I had prepared what I thought was an hour’s worth of music, and there were about three people in the audience, and I was just terrified out of my mind. I looked at my watch and started to play and went through the whole program, and I looked at my watch again and only about five minutes had gone by! I was like, ‘Oh my God, what am I gonna do, stuck up there all by myself?’
“My whole thing with music is so much about interaction. Even if it’s just with one other person, you put an idea out and then something comes back and you react to it, so it’s been this long struggle or learning experience to get comfortable with not having to feel like you have to fill up every inch of that space. When you’re alone, you put the idea out into the air, and in the beginning I was in a panic to think of something else right away — just the silence was deafening. Now I’m actually beginning to enjoy it. I can actually start to play real music while I’m by myself, maybe because I’m more sensitive that there’s something going on with the audience.”
Does Frisell start with his mind as a blank slate, as Keith Jarrett has described solo performances? And is he ever afraid of simply noodling?
“I definitely try to be not thinking. Sometimes I’ll think of certain songs that I’ll maybe want to play, but even having that much of a preconception seems to get in the way. I totally understand what Keith is talking about, you know, to go out there and just really give myself over to that moment. I have a lifetime of playing songs or noise or whatever I play, and if I really trust that, then that’s what seems best.
“As for noodling, it seems that if I’ve made some preconceived plan which takes me away from really entering into the music, then sometimes that feels more like (noodling). Oh, I don’t know — it’s hard talking about this stuff, because whenever I think of one statement, I can think of something that contradicts it completely, so you have to take everything with a little grain of salt.”
The territory he traverses can be surmised through his album titles: History, Mystery … Blues Dream … Gone, Just Like a Train … Unspeakable … Beautiful Dreamers … Good Dog, Happy Man … Ghost Town … The Willies. Among his notable groups were Naked City, a collaboration with the Zorn crew that virtually defined the word “edgy” (its complete works are collected in a five-CD box — one for the ages), and his unnamed trio with sax king Joe Lovano and the late drumming legend Paul Motian. Then there are more than 150 albums as a sideman.
Frisell, born in 1951, puts his music through all kinds of permutations — fuzz, feedback, echo, country twang with a modernist lilt, traditional jazz that’s not trad, avant-garde tinges, memory jogs into the unknown — to arrive at a simply stated version of that old folk standard Shenandoah. Out of seeming chaos comes a mood and a feeling that is achingly familiar, yet enrobed by irresistible mystery.
“Learning a new song,” he explains, “sometimes it takes a long time for it to sink down deep enough for it to come out that way. That’s probably why a lot of the songs I play, I’ve been playing them for a long time — just so they feel like they’re part of my bloodstream, I guess.”
Frisell plays with an effects box at his feet and, unlike many players who use gadgets (and sound like gadgets), it feels like part of his personae.
“I think people put too much weight on what kind of strings you use or what kind of guitar, what kind of amp, what kind of effect. I think the real test is what’s in your imagination. I also like to just mess around and experiment with whatever sounds I can find, but it comes more from hearing the sound that I can’t quite reach in my imagination, then trying to force it out of the instrument itself. Like I’ll listen to a Stravinsky piece and say, ‘Oh man, I wish I could get the sound of the whole orchestra playing just one note.’ You don’t ever get there, but you try to force it out somehow.”
On the DVD Solos, Frisell says: “I used to equate complexity with better music. How could you say that Segovia is more advanced than Robert Johnson or Jimi Hendrix or Wes Montgomery? I mean, for me there’s no higher or lower. It just depends what you can bring to it or what your imagination can come up with.”
This year’s Silent Comedy, which reminds me of a box of chocolates in which each piece imparts a different flavour, “was so great for me to do because I didn’t prepare or think at all. I just walked in and the whole album — the order, the titles — was completely done within a couple hours. John (Zorn) was the audience helping me. I really wanted to do something where I wasn’t obsessing over every little thing.”
Frisell performed his latest opus, Big Sur — released just last week — at last year’s Monterey Jazz Festival.
“The incredible part of it was that they set me up to stay on this ranch in Big Sur, and that’s where I wrote all the music, completely alone in this incredible environment. I didn’t have a phone or a television — I didn’t even know what time it was. I just sat there completely alone in what for me was the wilderness.
“It wasn’t that long ago when I thought the record industry is just crumbling, and I wasn’t really thinking (of doing an album).” Then the newly revived classic label Okeh, which released Big Sur, “just showed up right when I was working on the music. I know it’s unusually lucky.”
That kind of humility extends naturally toward Frisell’s approach to the possibilities of sound. Which makes us “unusually lucky” to listen to the results.
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BY S. VICTOR AARON / SOMETHING ELSE REVIEWS – June 8th, 2013
The progenitor of Americana jazz makes music that’s most directly inspired by a scenic crown jewel of Americana itself.
Long known to make beautifully pastoral music that’s inspired by many but delineative of no one, Bill Frisell’s long twisted music journey has often reflected the artist’s own benign mannerisms and the quest for a gorgeous melodic development, with no prejudice to how old or new it sounds. But a commission from the Monterrey Jazz Festival afforded the iconic guitarist rare time for deep reflection and rumination to make the music that ultimately grew out of the ten days he spent amidst a breathtaking piece of nature situated in the middle of California’s coast: Big Sur.
When Frisell left solitude at the Glen Deven Ranch at Big Sur, he had nineteen new songs that wound up on the album recorded a short time later up the road in Berkeley. When he returned to the place with his band — the newly formed Bug Sur Quintet — Jenny Scheinman (violin), Eyvind Kang (viola), Hank Roberts (cello) and Rudy Royston (drums) shaped these products of Frisell’s communion with nature into that distinctive Bill Frisell sound, borrowing from folk, jazz, rock, chamber music and Appalachia. None of these band members are new to Frisell’s world (Roberts first appeared on 1987′s Lookout For Hope), but the grouping is unique, a merger of his 858 Quartet and his Beautiful Dreamers trio, of which Kang plays in both. Trusted producer Lee Townsend again helms the producer’s booth, completing the circle of familiarity that virtually ensures continuity with prior works…think of it as part of a grouping of certain Frisell records that also includes recent entries Sign of Life and Beautiful Dreamers, and much earlier excursions into his folky side like Gone, Just Like a Train.
Like the scenery he enjoyed at the ranch, there’s an embracing airiness to the music with an absence of the haunted quality that was part and parcel to Frisell’s last Americana-themed project, Disfarmer. With only one song running over five minutes and six under three, the compositions often limit themselves to simple constructions with few changes; Frisell plausibly could have created some of these strains intentionally uncomplicated and broad enough for his band to add their own flavor to the proceedings.
“A Beautiful View” is illustrative: over a simple vamp, everyone contributes in a unique way such that everyone stands out, but combined it’s contrapuntal bliss. Other songs have more complex underpinnings but in discreet ways: “Gather Good Things” consists of more of those cleverly interacting harmonies among Scheinman, Kang and Roberts but spanning across a shifting melody. “Going To California” has a majesty not just in the way the song glides unhurriedly but deliberately through its stately chord changes, but also in how the strings handle the melody, Frisell provides harmonic counterpoints, and Royston supplies the emotion.
Still, it’s a very together band; Frisell had the Carter Family in mind when he came up with “Sing Together Like A Family,” and in a traditional country-folk way, the quintet conveys that same vibe of togetherness. But that symmetry continues right into the syncopated funk of the too-brief “A Good Spot”.
There’s not a whole lot of soloing or Frisell’s notorious excursions to the edge, but for those who dig that side of him, he does bare a little teeth against a bluegrass backdrop on “Hawks.” Frisell lets his hair down again, but in a distinctly California way on the backbeat driven, beach rock of “The Big One” and the presence of three orchestral stringed instruments does nothing to water down that feel. The same goes for “Highway 1,” where Royston’s swampy rock pace is exploited by everyone else, conjuring up something of a chamber version of the Beatles’ “Come Together.”
Thus, Big Sur introduces no new ideas from Bill Frisell, but does a pretty good job in amplifying and refining some old ones, and he almost always thrives when given a theme to build music around. The scenery has worked for Henry Miller, Hunter S. Thompson, Jack Kerouac, Charles Lloyd and Death Cab For Cutie, so why not a guy whose sensibilities were already positioned in that general area?
It’s music conceived by a clear mind, which in turn, can be ideal for clearing other people’s minds.