Few albums can make me wish the evening commute could stretch on for hours but time and again Bill Frisell accomplishes just that. He understands that jazz is an art form that's meant to be molded and fused with other genres. It's a sprawling sleeping beast into whose ears the lurid strains of rock, country, blues, folk, prog, classical, and everything else should be whispered. To hell with the Jazz Nazis that think only music recorded in the first three months of 1944 (or whatever year their favorite record was tracked.) Jazz is meant to evolve and few people get that like Bill Frisell.
His particular take fuses jazz guitar with 1950's cultural Americana pastiche, old western folk stylings and 1960's loungecore. If you aren't familiar with Bill's work, the best place to start is with his seminal Quartet album. Combining elements of Dixieland with blues and country while maintaining a jazz base, it sounds as if Tom Waits' backing band recorded a jam session while Tom was in the next room writing lyrics about making love to an amputee midget under the stars at Coney Island. It's unsurprising that the gently surreal music on Quartet was used to great effect as the soundtrack for the classic animated TV special Gary Larson's Tales From the Far Side.
2014's Guitar in the Space Age comes 18 years of sonic experimentation later and the results are magnificent. Here we find Frisell returning to his roots with instrumental re-imaginings of classics from the 1960s. Opener "Pipeline" drops the listener of the beaches of some distant planet where we watch the neon tide roll in as we sip Yellow Tail and drift off in thought. The inspired interpretations continue with "Turn, Turn, Turn" and "Tired of Waiting for You" along with a slew of other great works.
Highly recommended.
-Jordan
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