With a recording career that dates back to the early 1980s, Bill Frisell has worked in a wide range of styles, including jazz, fusion and Americana. A stylistically restless performer, he is in demand as a sideman as well as a collaborator.
Frisell will perform at the Crown Uptown on Saturday, March 30, as part of the Wichita Jazz Festival. Joining him are Rudy Royston on drums and Thomas Morgan on bass.
Interview Highlights
How did you assemble this trio? Let's start with Rudy Royston.
I met Rudy a long, long time ago. I grew up in Denver. He's from there, too. We didn't meet when we were kids or anything. But in the early '90s, I went to Denver to play with my friend Ron Miles, the trumpeter, for the first time. Rudy was the drummer. Rudy was flipping me out. He sounded so good.
At the time he was teaching and wasn't into going out and traveling around. But we kept in touch over all these years and about 10 years ago he made the decision that he really just wanted to play all the time. [Laughs.] He moved to New York and as soon as he got there we started playing a lot. He's been in my life for quite a long time. Aside from the music we have this shared experience of growing up in Denver. It adds to our connection.
You've also worked extensively with Thomas Morgan.
I met him when he was still in school. He actually subbed for [bass legend] Ron Carter at a rehearsal I was part of. He also played a lot with [drummer] Paul Motian, who was one of my longest, most amazing, musical relationships of my life. We've done a lot of duo stuff together. It was a no-brainer to get together with Rudy, too.
When you have a trio show like this, how do you think about the repertoire? Is there a certain set of songs that you have in mind or is it, "On the night, let's try this"?
The relationships with these guys have gone on long enough now that there's really no setlist. We just start going. There's enough material that we know that we can just start playing and then one thing leads to another. It's just the most incredible freedom.
Last night, I did a solo gig and I played just, out of the blue, "Somewhere Over The Rainbow." I don't know when the last time was that I played that song but something drew me to play it. Then I found out that it was [the song's composer] Harold Arlen's birthday. [Laughs.] It's weird stuff like that, this energy floating around that we can draw from.
It would be remiss of me not to ask about your relationship with the guitar. In all the years that you've been playing, all the records that you've done and live shows, do you still have a relationship with the instrument where you think, "What else can I do? Where else can I go? What other songs are in this or in me?"
Oh man, it's just never-ending. I've said that a lot. I mean, every day, I swear, it's the same feeling I had the first day that I got a guitar and I tried to put my fingers on it and tried to figure out what I was doing with the thing. Now I've been playing for however long, more than 50 years, and it still feels like I'm just at the very beginning. There's so much that I haven't figured out on it. So much to do. It just never…that's so much in the nature of music in general. I think that anybody who says that they've got it figured out is pulling your leg, I think. [Laughs.] You learn one new thing and then that new thing is just a doorway into a kaleidoscope of other, infinite new things. It just keeps going and going like that, you can't finish it.
I think that's something I had to come to terms with. I used to think that you could practice real hard and you'd get it all together. But it's not really like that. You just have to keep chipping away at it and that's what's the joy with it, I think.
When you think about the guitar, that just blows my mind that the same instrument with the same strings, tuned in the same way … When you think of [classical master Andres] Segovia and Robert Johnson and Jimi Hendrix and Wes Montgomery, they're all playing the same instrument, right? But the variety of sounds that come out of thing is just astounding.
You've worked in so many styles: The avant-garde stuff, Nashville, is that part of it? Trying to find out all of the different possibilities within the instrument?
I just love music in general. I've never bought into the idea of all these categories or dividing it up into these little boxes. To me, it can all coexist. I love all of it! [Laughs.] It's true that I'll play in a lot of different contexts. Someone will say, "How could you play this and then you jump over to this and play that?" To me, from the inside, I'm not really changing what I'm doing. I'm just listening to what's around me, and I pretty much function the same way in whatever circumstance I'm in.
I've been really lucky, in that way, to get to play with all these different people and that's really how I learn. More than learning out of a book or a school or listening to records. Getting to play with other people; it's the fastest way to get an injection of something. It's amazing.
Jedd Beaudoin is the host of Strange Currency. Follow him on Twitter @JeddBeaudoin. To contact KMUW News or to send in a news tip, reach us at news@kmuw.org.
