Bill Frisell is a guitar genius. Any of his multitude of collaborators — from John Zorn and Arto Lindsay to Elvis Costello and Marianne Faithfull — can attest to that. What’s becoming increasingly clear, though, is that he is also a brilliant composer. A bona fide American original, Frisell has found kindred spirits in the likes of Stephen Foster, Charles Ives, John Philip Sousa and Aaron Copeland. A seemingly guileless musical chameleon, he’s also explored all sorts of interpretative connections, ranging from Muddy Waters and Sonny Rollins to Bob Dylan and Madonna. It’s not so surprising, then, that Frisell would turn his attentions to country — a style that’s always been implicit in his muti-hued, often humorous playing.
If the emblematically titled Nashville marks a departure for Frisell, it’s mainly in terms of its unadorned openness. With bassist Viktor Krauss by his side and a changing ensemble that includes Union Station stalwarts Ron Block on banjo and Adam Steffey on mandolin, as well as Jerry Douglas on dobro and Pat Bergeson on harmonica, Frisell sheds his usual array of effects and gets buck naked, picking out a gently swaying hybrid of jazz and bluegrass.
The opening composition, “Gimme A Holler”, rocks back and forth like a porch swing, with Frisell and Douglas trading licks that roll on like the lulling trance of a long summer afternoon. Other tracks, such as “Go Jake” and “Pipe Down”, evoke a more playful mood, with Bergeson’s harp sounding some rural hiccups. The three covers — Neil Young’s bittersweet “One Of These Days”, Hazel Dickens’ biting “Will Jesus Wash the Bloodstains From Your Hands?” and the Skeeter Davis hit “The End of the World” — are also the only vocal numbers. All three feature Frisell’s longtime pal Robin Holcomb, a singer whose eclectic background and shimmering voice are a perfect foil for the set’s subtle intensity.
While so much modern American music is about Saturday night (and sometimes Sunday morning ), Nashville is more about such ordinary times as Tuesday morning, or after supper on Thursday. Frisell’s real genius, it now seems, is for finding the profound nuances of those kinds of moments and echoing them in steel strings.
