Bill Frisell has been conjuring an inspired solo soundscape for electric guitar for so long that the world has grown accustomed to that most downhome of axes being technically and electronically transformed into a big band. Now with the Brussels Philharmonic and Umbria Jazz orchestras, the chance comes to hear where his imagination takes him when the big backdrop is being painted by others.

Frisell is joined by regular partners in bassist Thomas Morgan and drummer Rudy Royston - but the most important long-running connection here is the guitarist’s 50-year relationship with the great Mike Gibbs, which began when he studied composition under Gibbs’ tutelage at the Berklee School of Music in the mid-1970s. With his famously light touch and exquisite ambiguities of harmony and dynamics, the now 86-year-old Gibbs has arranged the music for the two January 2022 concerts in Belgium and Italy that form this set.

The repertoire stretches from staples of Frisell’s songbook such as ‘Strange Meeting’ (with its gently dreamy harmonies turning to softly early-rockish guitar tones) to a gently swinging, orchestrally-lilting ‘Sweet Rain’, which Gibbs originally wrote in the 1960s for Stan Getz. Striking versions of standard songs include a tonally gleaming but wistful ‘Lush Life’ and a chorally-textured and reverential ‘Beautiful Dreamer’.

The Umbria tracks however, with their smaller ensemble, are invitations to Frisell and the trio to play harder, and for Gibbs’ arrangements to foreground his enthrallingly Gil Evans-inspired use of high woodwind and trumpet exclamations, and resonant deep brass - a combination that furnishes many of the collection’s standout moments. Notable among them are Frisell’s ‘Monica Jane’ (blending tender guitar lines into the band’s voicelike harmonies), a choppy, seductively Evansesque ‘Lookout for Hope’, the blues-sleazy ‘Levees’ - and the Umbria finale, a thrillingly uplifting account of ‘We Shall Overcome’. Blue Note have also issued a 3-LP vinyl set including extra material from both fine gigs.