Bill Frisell - Four

180-gram double LP

Grammy Award-winning guitarist and composer Bill Frisell returns with Four

Two years after issuing his acclaimed trio album Valentine, Grammy Award-winning guitarist and composer Bill Frisell returns with Four, a stunning meditation on loss, renewal, and those mysterious inventions of friendship.

Frisell's third album for Blue Note Records since signing with the label in 2019 proffers new interpretations of previously recorded originals as well as nine new tunes. The session brings together artists of independent spirits and like minds: Blue Note stablemates Gerald Clayton on piano and Johnathan Blake on drums, and longtime collaborator Greg Tardy on saxophone, clarinet, and bass clarinet.

"This combination of people had been floating around in the back of my mind since before the pandemic," says the Brooklyn-based artist.

For generations, critics and peers have recognized Frisell as one of the music's most treasured participants. Over the years, he's garnered praise and attention for his playing as well as the anatomy of his compositions — how he structures a form around often a simple melody or progression, creating a gesture at once complex and elemental. Four presents this side of his artistry at its most intuitive.

During the lockdown, like so many prolific artists, Frisell turned inward. "It was traumatic not to be with people," he says, "so I picked up my guitar, and my guitar saved me." For those months, he wrote stacks of melodies and compositional ideas. By the time he scheduled Four's recording sessions, he'd amassed piles of notebooks filled with fragmented music. Laying little more than a sketch of information before his fellow artists, Frisell encouraged a kind of spontaneous, cooperative orchestration. "Nothing was really figured out," he says. "Everyone had the information, but it was super open as far as who plays what when. Without a bass, it was a little scary, but I wasn't thinking so much about the instruments. It's always more about the chemical reaction that's going to happen."

While Frisell and Tardy have enjoyed a long association of mutual respect and friendship, the former wondered how their musical familiarity might reactivate alongside two newer energies. Frisell met Clayton when Charles Lloyd asked the guitarist to sit in at a festival some years ago. "That was the first time I'd really played with Gerald," he says. "I could feel that trust and respect just instantly." When Clayton joined Frisell's trio as a guest during a run at the Vanguard, their connection intensified. "He would transform things that I've played a thousand times, find pathways through it that I never heard anyone do before." Similarly, Frisell felt an immediate kinship when he sat in on a date with Blake. "I was like, ‘Who is this guy?'"

Across the recording, each artist's expression emerges as equal parts melodic and textural. Strong, subtle choices establish the music's depth of character from the first phrase. Their collective counterpoint shapeshifts, but they remain true to each song's initial idea. Rarely does anyone grab the mic. "Everyone is just jumping into it all together, and then you find this way of talking with each other," says Frisell. "You listen to Miles Davis' quintet and maybe Miles is taking a solo, but it's the cooperative thing that blows your mind."

Because much of the repertoire developed at a time of profound loss, the record's tinged with wistful melancholy. Written for Frisell's childhood friend Alan Woodward who died quite recently, "Dear Old Friend" presents a tender, almost angelic theme, played with a certain motioned non-tempo. "Alan I'd known since the seventh grade," says Bill. "He was there when I got my first electric guitar. When I was just starting to mess around with music, he always encouraged me. And he'd keep showing up in different places."

The title applies not only to Woodward, but to the person to whom Frisell dedicates the entire album, his musical soulmate, the late Ron Miles. "He's my closest, longest brother-friend," says Frisell. "You could say he's not here, but he's totally here because so much of what I'm playing comes from my times spent with him. And then that gets passed on to someone else. That's actual tangible proof that these people are still here."

 

Side A

1. Dear old friend (for Allen Woodard)

2. Claude Utley

3. The Pioneers

Side B

1. Holiday

2. Waltz For Hal Willner

3. Lookout For Hope

Side C

1. Monroe

2. Wise Women

3. Blue From Before

4. Always

Side D

1. Good Dog, Happy Man

2. Invisible

3. Dog on a Roof

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