BillFrisell is most commonly known as a jazz musician, but he has made his reputation as a master of multiple genres, instantly at home playing jazz, rock, blues, country, progressive folk and more, while collaborating with an array of musicians in groups large and small.
The Grammy Award-winning guitarist has made more than 30 albums since bursting on the scene in the early 1980s. He plays live often, touring constantly.
But right now he’s off the road, taking the time as he has the past few years to settle into a residency at the Vermont Studio Center in Johnson. It’s a welcome respite for this self-effacing, soft-spoken musician to work on new material, or just gather himself and recharge before moving on to his next big project.
Mitch Wertlieb recently met up with Bill Frisell at his threadbare VSC studio, a large, sparsely decorated room with music sheets lining the walls, a small amp for his guitar, a drafting desk and two wooden chairs.
Bill Frisell grew up in Denver, Colo., and while he studied and played clarinet throughout his high school years, he recalls the moment in his life when knew the guitar was going to be his instrument of choice, and lifelong passion.
“I’d been in college for a couple years, I’d moved back to Denver, I was living in this little tiny apartment alone, teaching in a music store, trying to find gigs, mainly just practicing," he said. "But I made a commitment to myself that this is what makes sense to me, and no matter what happens I’m just going to do this, and so it was this kind of a clear moment. I must have been 20 or 21 years old at that time."
While he’s frequently called a jazz musician, he’s found inspiration in a lot of the music and musicians who came before him.
“The people that I was inspired by, Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk or Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins, all those people ... they’re taking everything that they know and transforming it through this language, and so it was just this opening up to everything, all the music that I’d heard throughout my life, I just let it back in. And I love putting myself into these different contexts. You can’t help but have your own sound if you just acknowledge where you’ve been somehow. “
Frisell has also reached audiences with cover tunes of songs like John Hiatt’s “Have a Little Faith”, and Bob Dylan’s “Just Like a Woman,” but one of his greatest musical influences was the Beatles, and he remembers vividly watching the band’s first appearance on the Ed Sullivan show. In 2011, he produced an album called “All We Are Saying...” featuring instrumental covers of John Lennon compositions.
“That music, I sort of played at it a little bit when I was that age. I played a few of those songs, after having this whole lifetime of playing, since then. I’m talking about 40 or 50 years of just trying to learn music and then going back and looking, but really playing it, filtered through that whole experience ... I just learned so much. There’s no way you can top the original version of those songs. I had to wait this long just to do it so that it felt honest,” Frisell said.
Several years ago, he came to the Vermont Studio Center to visit his wife, a painter, who was staying there to work on her art. “Almost the moment I got here, I wanted to be here too. So then I applied to come a year after that. I’ve been here four times. This time I don’t have any goal or anything, it’s just every day I come in here and fill up all these pages with stuff,” Frisell explained. “And then being here with all of these writers and painters, the struggles that they go through, I just find it inspiring being here.”
The walls in the studio are hung with photocopied sheets of music that he’s been working on. And maybe some of that music written in Vermont will end up on a future album.
Speaking of his time in Vermont, Frisell has the highest praise.
“Maybe I’m just naïve or something, but it just seems like one of the few places left that, it seems to me, on a very surface level that Vermont hasn’t screwed itself up quite as bad as a lot of other places in this country. It’s just so beautiful, I’ve just had such a good time being here,” Frisell said. “It feels like kind of lifesaver to me.”
Note: Regular listeners of Morning Edition on VPR know that Mitch Wertlieb is fond of playing a fair amount of Grateful Dead tunes for what we call “music beds” during breaks in the programming, but the artist he features more often than any other in a given week is Bill Frisell.
