Bill Frisell 858 Quartet

[7/4]

April 17, 2008

Music Review

Painting Outside Those Usual Lines

By BEN RATLIFF, NYT

From left, Jenny Scheinman, Eyvind Kang, Bill Frisell and Hank Roberts at Village Vanguard.

Bill Frisell wrote some string quartet music for a CD to accompany a book of Gerhard Richter paintings in 2002. The paintings were all called “858,” so Mr. Frisell used the same title for his eight pieces and for the band itself. These works — played by Mr. Frisell on electric guitar, Jenny Scheinman on violin, Eyvind Kang on viola and Hank Roberts on cello — weren’t tunes so much as gestures: slow or frenetic, based on short figures. Looking at the wide, heavy paint-slicks on the canvases and thinking of music, he tried for something more sublime, dense and basically classical than what he’s associated with.

The group outlived the project. Mr. Frisell has cultivated it onstage a bit since then, and the 858 Quartet has grown out of its original purpose into something else. At the Village Vanguard on Tuesday, the band played a wickedly beautiful first set of the week. It wasn’t like the old record: it was more in line with Mr. Frisell’s other music, with its mild sense of humor and its reflexive embrace of blues, bop and country languages.

But unlike some of Mr. Frisell’s other music, it didn’t feel micromanaged or built as a reflection of his sonic image or beholden to his frequent improvising tics. The players’ individual personalities came out and infiltrated the songs.

What songs they were, too. After a beginning of long, slow chords, with Mr. Frisell electronically setting up guitar loops — it sounded like a small slice from the Richter project — some blues harmony emerged, and Mr. Frisell improvised, while the other three played a basic blues progression around him. Suddenly a riff began, and out of that grew a song, or something longer and bramblier than a song.

It was, note for note, played in unison, Charlie Christian’s 30-second guitar solo from “Benny’s Bugle,” a piece Christian recorded with Benny Goodman in 1940, with big interval jumps, bent notes and a yanking swing feeling. The transcription of an eminent old solo, reused as written material and arranged for a band, has a little subhistory in jazz. But this isn’t a group you would have expected to try it. The four musicians played with the song’s closing riff for a while longer, and 40 minutes after the set began, the group took its first pause.

More classical music led into Hank Williams’s “Your Cheatin’ Heart,” with Mr. Roberts adapting the vocal part, expanding it with improvisation. And then the group did again what it had done with Charlie Christian, but this time with Lee Konitz’s tricky solo from “Subconscious-Lee,” based on the chords of “What Is This Thing Called Love”; toward the end of it Mr. Frisell, who can find endless backing chords to anything, accompanied, while the other three played the solo in unison around him.

Finally, for 15 minutes or so the quartet exercised themselves on the curling riff from “Baba Drame,” by the Malian guitarist Boubacar Traore, with Mr. Kang playing long lines, like an Indian classical musician, while Mr. Frisell and Mr. Roberts played variations on a rockabilly rhythm — boom-chicka-boom. They finished by charging through Thelonious Monk’s “Skippy.”

In about 80 minutes they’d taken a long side road off an essentially European high-art concept, jumping between continents, regions and styles. Not being even slightly formalist about it, they showed how undivided music can be.

[PHILLYQ]

I saw them at Tonic once for a Kermit Driscoll benefit and they were excellent! Frisell seemed to be having a great time and they played as a group rather than a collection of individuals.

[mjzee]

Richter 858

[7/4]

Maybe his best leader album in years, IMHO.

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