John L Walters 

Bill Frisell

Queen Elizabeth Hall, London ****
  
  


"Things aren't always what they seem," Bill Frisell once wrote about his music. "What I love about music is what cannot be explained." Who can disagree? Frisell interprets melodies and improvises solos with fire, grace and virtuosity, but sometimes the best moments come from somewhere else altogether. They are in the strange and beautiful transitions, or in the spaces between beats (in one of those achingly slow grooves he specialises in) or in the smiling interplay he generates with his fellow musicians.

You might not expect the rhythm section from a band called Sex Mob - Kenny Wollesen (drums) and Tony Scherr (double bass and acoustic guitar) - to be masters of restraint and sensitivity, but in Frisell's company they play in all the right places, while adding a baggy, offbeat sensibility all of their own.

The band began their set with John McLaughlin's gloriously asymmetric Follow Your Heart ("one of the most thrilling reworkings of the blues in the entire history of jazz", as Ian Carr said), which has become a standard for adventurous guitarists and numerate drummers everywhere. This morphed into a reading of Bacharach and David's What the World Needs Now as a jazz waltz which in turn became Frisell's own That Was Then (from the Good Dog Happy Man album), a subtle, rocking groove.

Then Frisell and Scherr switched to acoustic guitars and Wollesen drummed an empty case with brushes for a good-natured arrangement of John Hardy.

Robin Holcomb, who had opened the show with her idiosyncratic pieces for piano and voice, appeared again to sing Stephen Foster's Hard Times. Then the trio went back to their usual instruments for a swinging blow based loosely on Henry Mancini's Days of Wine and Roses. Someone yelled "bebop" in delight. (This was a jazz festival, after all.)

In fact, Frisell and crew seemed to sense that they were preaching to the wholly jazz converted and pushed everything to the limit: noise, quietness, abstraction, complexity and sheer simplicity - the final encore of Over The Rainbow was as dazzling in its spare eloquence as Now's the Time was in its ring- modulated obtuseness.

Frisell is the most fastidious and caring steward of the "greatest hits" repertoire. When he played What's Going On he delivered a crystal-clear rendition of Marvin Gaye's original phrasing that made the song as moving and beautiful as ever. Yet it sounded like nobody but Bill Frisell, driving a 30-year-old tune into the 21st century. His music is a personal journey through 20th-century America that goes beyond notes and chords, and the QEH audience loved every minute of the ride.

 

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