Bill Frisell’s Bay Area run brings in some old friends and a world premiere
A 4.8 earthquake had just jostled Bill Frisell’s home in Brooklyn, but the temblor wasn’t strong enough to rattle the guitarist’s preternatural calm.
With an epicenter about 50 miles east in New Jersey, the shaker was an uncommon enough occurrence in the region to inspire a good deal of post-earthquake anxiety in New York. But Frisell sounded utterly preoccupied by the task at hand, preparing for a four-night residency at Freight & Salvage, April 18-21.
It’s his third extended run at the venue since 2019, and like his previous engagement he opens with a solo performance and adds collaborators with each concert.
“I’m thinking of it almost like it becomes one long composition,” said Frisell, 73, who tends to see connections and threads running between his vast and varied discography.
Friday’s show is a duo with vocalist Petra Haden, with whom Frisell has collaborated on several albums over the past two decades, most recently 2016’s “When You Wish Upon a Star.” The rhythm section for that project, Hayward-raised bassist Thomas Morgan and drummer Rudy Royston, convenes Saturday for a concert by one of Frisell’s primary working units in recent years.
The run closes Sunday with the world premiere of a new sextet piece for the trio and violinist Jenny Scheinman, violist Eyvind Kang and cellist Hank Roberts, reuniting the string players who were at the center of Frisell’s music for about a decade.
From 2004’s lushly orchestrated “Unspeakable” to the dense chamber jazz of 2005’s “Richter 858” (inspired by the work of German painter Gerhard Richter) and 2013’s gorgeous “Big Sur,” which features Frisell, Royston and the string trio, Frisell has created a striking array of musical settings for Scheinman, Kang, and Roberts.
Sunday’s performance is a reunion of sorts, the first time Frisell has worked with the three string players since 2017.
“I really had a thing with them and it kept on developing,” Frisell said. “I never meant for it to stop, but I’d go off in this direction or that direction, and then the pandemic, and now I haven’t played with them as a group for quite a long time. I don’t know when I got it in my head I’d write all new music for that night, but it’s been in the forefront of my mind.”
One of the most influential and creatively voracious musicians of his generation, Frisell isn’t averse to sideman gigs, whether accompanying older jazz legends like saxophonist Charles Lloyd or younger visionaries like trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire (whose Owl Song trio with Frisell and drummer Herlin Riley kicks off the Stanford Jazz Festival June 21).
Frisell described the studio from which he was speaking as covered with hundreds of pages of sheet music. Still very much in the process of composing and editing Sunday’s program, he’s also thinking of bringing in new arrangements of Thelonious Monk’s “Skippy,” John Coltrane’s “Giant Steps” and Tadd Dameron’s bebop standard “Hot House,” Scheinman said.
Now living in Arcata, Scheiman played in a series of signature Bay Area bands in the 1990s before relocating to Brooklyn, where she earned renown working with singer/songwriters like Rodney Crowell, Lucinda Williams, and Robbie Fulks and jazz artists Christian McBride, Allison Miller, and Jason Moran (while leading many projects of her own).
Scheinman describes the string trio-based work with Frisell as “formative for all of us.” She listens to “Unspeakable” and “Big Sur” regularly, and has often found performing the music that Frisell wrote for her, Kang and Roberts an almost mystical experience.
Frisell billed the Freight residency “In My Dreams,” which relates to a dream that he often talks about where “he sees all the sounds and colors being together,” said Scheinman, who returns to the Bay Area for her own residency at Mr. Tipple’s Oct. 10-12.
“In the projects with strings and the expanded settings there have been moments live when we all see that dream, the sonic inclusivity and time bending where everybody’s there with him from all time,” she said. “There’s already a magic to the way strings play together, literally resonating each other’s instruments and serving as connective tissue in a larger band.”
Describing the Freight as one of his favorite venues, Frisell has deep ties to the East Bay. Berkeley therapist Lee Townsend has produced just about every Frisell album since 1987, and the guitarist’s sound engineer since 1990, Claudia Engelhart, grew up in a creatively charged Berkeley family.
He plans to arrive in town after taking a solo week-long road trip from Tucson, “with a stop in Joshua Tree for a few nights,” he said. “I’m just wanting to be alone in the car somewhere to figure out a lot of the final decisions.”
Contact Andrew Gilbert at jazzscribe@aol.com.
BILL FRISELL
When & where: 8 p.m. April 18-20, 7 p.m. April 21 at Freight & Salvage, Berkeley
Tickets: $45-$65; thefreight.org
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