Great show- not up to the transcendental brilliance of the Cuesta show a while back, which removed me from my body, squired me around the metaverse and brought me back home safely, but well worthwhile.
In a bit of marketing mis-direction Bill was listed as the headliner when they were actually delivering a Jack DeJohnette group, featuring Bill Frisell.
Not being an egomaniacal attention whore, Bill happily took a secondary role, blending in seamlessly with the ensemble. Which was fine, but not necessarily what I would have preferred.
This show was operating on more of an intellectual level- it had things to say and points to make, and instead of being enraptured and caught up in the tide I was thinking...which was the point of the exercise, but again not my preference.
There were a couple of highly dissonant, experimental pieces that swiftly cleared the auditorium of everyone with gray hair. I'm not a fan of what I call "goose jazz" (lots of unstructured honking, so named after early life exposure to John Coltrane's more experimental works), but in the context of the show it worked well.
A crazy mechanical piece called Entranced Androids (that sounded like an automobile assembly line reprogrammed to play music) segued into an absolutely beautiful song by an African guitarist that could not have sounded more lush & human. A collision of found sounds and noise called Cartoon Explosion led into a Miles Davis ballad done as a piano trio.
A fine evening, if a bit more mentally challenging than anticipated, and lacking some of the emotional fulfillment of his last visit to town.
But Frisell is a musical chameleon, and you do have to pay attention to who he's playing with as much as what he's playing. His career encapsulates extremes from the roaring assault of his work with Kenny Baron & Kermit Driscoll to the delicate Americana of Nashville to the menacing, gothic blues of Gone, Just Like a Train...and all stops in between.
Delivering something unexpected is one of the reasons I love him so much.
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