Bill Frisell Trio dazzle in Brum with two hours of ceaselessly inventive music making

Birmingham’s Stoney Lane Records don’t do things by halves. For this first foray into live music promotion they set the bar high by booking guitar legend Bill Frisell’s long-established trio with bassist Thomas Morgan and drummer Rudy Royston. On the bare wooden Bradshaw Hall stage the three seemed huddled together like wagons on a wide prairie. After Frisell’s few introductory words they seemed unaware of their capacity audience, launching into long and seamless segues of tunes sketched in the guitarist’s trademark deconstructive style.

Their easy collective freedom left almost no opportunity to applaud a tune or solo: things shifted and drifted along, ideas blossoming between them. Tunes came in and out of focus: ‘Shenandoah’ gradually assembled out of its component phrases, each given the individual attention of the master (dis)arranger. A multi-layered cacophony of loops gave birth to ‘Straight No Chaser’, its methodical blues riff angularly disrupted while the groove sustained. And so it went, more or less uninterrupted, for the best part of two hours – an astonishing feat of musical stamina that never flagged in inventiveness.

Was there even a set list? The guitarist seemed spontaneously led by his own musical logic while Morgan’s ability to anticipate that process was uncanny and well matched by Royston’s quick-witted restraint. The tone and tempo rarely changed, there were no fancy time signatures, only timely dynamic shifts. Frisell is the doyen of nuance and embellishment and the overall effect was captivatingly easy listening. Teasing the audience with the opening phrase of ‘In My Life’ it soon became clear it was simply that phrase he was going to play, drifting away into a rolling palm wine guitar groove to end the set.

As he unshackled his customised Telecaster with a rare smile there was no sign that Frisell was fatigued, more that – his work done – it was time to move on across that wide ol’ prairie.. For Stoney Lane, however, the challenge is how to follow that...