Bill Frisell has launched “Holiday,” a playful new observe from the acclaimed guitarist’s forthcoming album Four, a surprising meditation on loss, renewal, and friendships that was produced by Lee Townsend and comes out November 11 on Blue Note.
The album convenes a brand new line-up of musical mates, impartial spirits, and like minds with Gerald Clayton on piano, Johnathan Blake on drums, and longtime collaborator Greg Tardy on saxophone, clarinet, and bass clarinet.
The album’s first single “Waltz for Hal Willner” was a poignant tribute to Frisell’s expensive good friend, however Four additionally transmits pleasure, exuberance, and hope. A unusual, syncopated gesture, and have for Blake, “Holiday” presents a compelling instance of the album’s by line. “It’s just a few notes in the melody,” says Frisell. “There are these little signposts that we can hit together, but it’s pretty minimal information. It’s a structure — a jungle gym that we’re all climbing around.”
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 these months, he wrote stacks of melodies and compositional concepts. By the time he scheduled Four’s recording classes, he’d amassed piles of notebooks crammed with fragmented music.
Laying little greater than a sketch of data earlier than his fellow artists, Frisell inspired a type of spontaneous, cooperative orchestration. “Everyone had the information, but it was super open as far as who plays what when,” he says. “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.”
Across the recording, every artist’s expression emerges as equal elements melodic and textural. Strong, refined decisions set up the music’s depth of character from the primary phrase. Their collective counterpoint shapeshifts, however they continue to be true to every tune’s preliminary concept. Rarely does anybody seize 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.”