Bill Frisell interview: “I hear a song and have to ask myself if it’s remembered or new”

When I caught up with him, Bill Frisell had only recently arrived in Sweden at the beginning of an international tour for Harmony, his new four-piece group, playing music from the album of the same name. The record marks his first venture under his own name for Blue Note, but it had its origins back in 2016 when the “innovative grass roots” organisation FreshGrass gave Bill a $25,000 commission to create new music. So we began our conversation by looking back at that starting point.

“It gave me the opportunity to do something new,” muses Bill. “But I think usually I do things in a much more haphazard way. It’s rare that an opportunity like that presents itself, so mostly the projects I get to work on and develop are almost accidental. In the run-up to this, everything seemed rather last minute, because I was simultaneously working on the music and thinking, ‘What am I gonna do?’. But I guess the first thing was that early on in the process I had settled on a band, and they were all musicians I’d known for quite a while.

“The person I’d gotten to know most recently in the line-up was baritone guitarist Luke Bergman, whom I originally met in Seattle, but I’ve known him now for many years. I’ve known cellist Hank Roberts for 40 years, and I first met singer Petra Haden at least 20 years ago when I was working with her father, Charlie Haden, and drummer Paul Motian. But I was the only thing they all had in common. None of them had even met one another before, let alone played together. But I just felt they’d make a great combination for what I had in mind, which was basically that I’d play along with the cello and baritone guitar, and Petra would sing.

“Then we had the first rehearsal, shortly before the launch which was out in California. The world premiere was at the Strand in San Francisco. And I realised they could all sing, and that together they had something very special. In fact, a lot of what we ended up doing, we just worked out the night before the first concert, and I remember, as they all sang, thinking what a thrill it was for me to play guitar among those voices!”

I suggest to Bill that you can almost hear that process of defining the band in its version of his composition ‘God’s Wing’ed Horse’ that he and Julie Miller originally wrote in 2011 for Buddy Miller’s Majestic Silver Strings project. Unlike that quite conventional treatment, on the new album HARMONY, Bill starts this one alone, then Petra joins him as he picks out the clear melody in unison with her, before the other voices (and instruments) add their contributions as the song progresses. It’s a great contrast to one of his new compositions, called ‘Curiosity’. To me, that piece, which is built on a repetitive vocal cell above a repeated ostinato bassline for cello and guitar, owes plenty to classical minimalists like Philip Glass or Terry Riley.

Bill laughs at the comparison. “Oh that piece, ‘Curiosity’! I guess you could make that connection, but it has a kind of segue role on the record, and there are a couple of other short and contrasting pieces like that, where I feel they make a connection between other quite different types of music. It wasn’t until we’d recorded everything that I could see that connecting role for them in the finished album. Often, after I’ve made a record, I have the feeling it’s only the beginning – the tip of the iceberg. The music always develops so much. And we’ve done quite a lot of concerts since the project began, mainly in California, but also in unusual places like the FreshGrass stage in the old factory that’s now the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in North Adams. But it’s only now that I feel that we’re here in Sweden on the start of a tour, and we can really start to play the music.”

Whereas the Buddy Miller piece (a track on which Bill himself played) goes back eight years, I was mildly amused that the traditional song ‘Red River Valley’ also shows up on his most recent duo album for ECM, Epistrophy, with bassist Thomas Morgan, which came out earlier this year. “Oh, wow,” responds Frisell. “D’you know I didn’t even think of that, though we did record that album for Manfred Eicher back in 2017, so though it came out this year it’s almost ancient history for me. The treatments are different, of course, because on the new record, it’s just a vocal track. But there’s one thing I find with getting older, which is that I have just such an accumulation of melodies floating around in my head. I often can’t remember when I last played them. With some tunes that come into my mind, I don’t always know when or even if I wrote them! I hear a song and I have to ask myself if it’s remembered or new. Once or twice I have thought I’ve got a great idea for a new piece and then, when I’ve noted it down, I realise where I heard it before! I can see how plagiarism of tunes happens, just from my own experience of having played all this stuff and knowing that some of it goes on lingering in your subconscious.”

One tune that is a real surprise on the album is a harsh, angular, slow reading of Pete Seeger’s ‘Where Have All The Flowers Gone’. It is astonishingly different from the original, and yet it’s the one that lingered in my mind most after first hearing the record.

“You know, most of the time when I play a song I’m very particular about not changing it. So, on this album there’s a very detailed version of Billy Strayhorn’s ‘Lush Life’, with me playing and Petra singing, which I think is really close to what he wrote. And I feel the same if I’m playing a John Lennon tune, for example. I want to play it without alteration, and be absolutely sure of the original. But you’re right, ‘Where Have All The Flowers Gone’ is a pretty radical departure from Pete Seeger. In this case it’s a song I have known my whole life, so whatever I did to it grew out of me feeling the song, out of a lifetime of it being there in my head. Yes, I re-harmonised it, but actually the contour of the melody and the words are the same. It’s just the pace and the harmony that have changed.”

Bill Frisell (right), with Ginger Baker and Charlie Haden

One song on the record that bears out Frisell’s aim not to change things around is Charlie Haden’s composition ‘There in a Dream’, which is pretty faithful to the Quartet West version on Charlie’s 1995 album Now is the Hour. “Yes, I’d heard that record and originally I thought we’d just play it. Then Petra happened to mention the words that Jesse Harris had put to her father’s tune, and they seemed to work for us, so that’s what we did.”

Mention of Charlie Haden brings to mind the album that he and Bill made for Atlantic in 1996 in a trio with Ginger Baker called Falling off the Roof. As Ginger’s death had only just been announced when I spoke to Bill, it seemed like the moment to ask him what he remembered of those sessions. “Asking me that today is quite strange. It almost seems like it’s part of a dream,” he replies. “Because when I got to Sweden and checked into the hotel, the first person I saw was the bassist Jonas Hellborg, and it was Jonas who introduced me to Ginger for the first time when they were playing together at the Bracknell Jazz Festival in Britain, which I guess must have been 1988. I was there with Mike Gibbs, I think, or just possibly that year it was Ronald Shannon Jackson. I was just walking across the grass at South Hill Park. I remember it as being like a field, and Jonas and Ginger were coming the other way, so we were introduced and I shook hands. I’d almost forgotten about this until I met Jonas again yesterday and we started talking about Ginger.

“I’d been in my final year of high school when I actually went to hear Cream play, and it was such a thrill hearing Ginger and Jack and Eric. In fact, that same high school year I also heard both Miles Davis and Jimi Hendrix playing live, for the first time in my life. But that Cream concert was when I first heard Ginger’s sound. And funnily enough that same year, at the end of school, was the first time I heard Charlie Haden on a record, and thinking back, I just could not have imagined then that all those years later I’d actually be playing on a record with them both.

“Doing that album with Ginger was the idea of Chip Stern. He wanted to put the three of us together and somehow he talked the record company into it! At that point, I’d literally only shaken Ginger’s hand once on that visit to the UK, so he didn’t know me. It was sort of like an arranged marriage. So I really didn’t know quite what to think when I got to the studio, Bear Creek, at Woodinville, near Seattle. I walked in and Ginger was setting up his drums. I introduced myself, but he really didn’t say much, which made me even more nervous than I was already. But seconds after we started playing, the music took over and we were just three guys playing together. I was very happy about that, it just felt like real honest music, a musical conversation. And Ginger was very generous, as both Charlie and I had brought in tunes and we got to do them. These days I hear people talking about Ginger and I find it frustrating to hear some of what they say. Yes, he had a gruff exterior, but that seems to be all people talk about – that and the drugs and how ‘difficult’ he was. But that was not my experience at all. I felt, like Stevie Wonder said about him, that he was actually a really sensitive person.

“I think that exterior and the gruffness was really a way to protect himself, because I know from those sessions that he had a really true love for the music, and he knew the history of the music. Sometimes very sensitive people like that have to put up a shell. But I am really pleased we got the chance to make that album together.”

This article originally appeared in the December 2019 / January 2020 issue of Jazzwise