Bill Frisell - Guitar in the Space Age

Artist: Bil Frisell
Album: Guitar in the Space Age
Genre: Jazz Fusion
2014
LP/Album
Favorite Track: Turn, Turn, Turn
Available as: Download, CD (Okeh), and vinyl (Music on Vinyl)

I hadn't really given too much thought to this blog over the last week. I mean, I have a list of artists and albums I want to write about, and I've been adding to it, but I haven't been doing much actual writing (which is obvious, since I haven't posted anything in almost a week). Then, I decided I would take myself out for lunch. I'd been craving gyros for a while and there's a place here in Bloomington that I remembered having good ones. Long story short, my memory was mistaken and the wrap really wasn't anything special. However, while I was downtown, I decided to stick my head in a couple record stores and see what was up. I grabbed an original 1969 Moby Grape (complete with middle finger) with a ratty cover but nice vinyl, and a CD from Fred Hersch, one of my favorite jazz pianists. Now, why am I writing about this album instead of that? Because, when I was listening to Fred, I was reading the CD booklet, in which he talks about dedicating a song to Bill Frisell and calls him one of his favorite musicians. Since I'm always on the lookout for new stuff to listen to, I decided to go on Spotify and check Bill out. Almost all the top tracks were from his new album, this one, so I listened to a couple and was immediately hooked in.

I don't know too much about Bill Frisell, apart from the fact that, like many successful contemporary jazz artists, he's been playing for a long time. I know enough about him to know that this album is a bit of a departure for him. It's not so much jazz as instrumental rock: similar almost to Joe Satriani, except several degrees softer. Guitar in the Space Age is almost entirely a cover album of songs from the early-to-mid 1960s, featuring a number of surf instrumentals (it starts off with a cover of the Chantays' "Pipeline"). There are a couple originals on the album, but they're actually far less interesting than the covers are.

Bill does something with his guitar on this album that's different than any jazz guitarist I've heard before, and which probably makes jazz purists very angry. He uses effects. Wah-wah and distortion. Not on all of the songs, but on a couple. That, along with the conventional structure of the cover songs (unlike many jazz covers of pop songs, these are pretty straight ahead without too much improvisation), is what makes this almost an instrumental rock album as opposed to jazz.

Although all the covers are fantastic, my favorite song on the album by far is Bill's cover of "Turn, Turn, Turn," originally a Pete Seeger song but made famous by the masters of 60s folk rock, The Byrds. Their version of the song has long been a favorite of mine, but Bill's version is almost better. The sharp tonality of his (and his accompanist's) guitar cuts through the air like a knife. It's slightly slower than the Byrds' version, which, to me, makes it seem less like an ordinary cover and more like a reverent tribute. The sound genuinely thrilled me, which isn't really all that easy to do.

It would be very easy for a guitarist of Frisell's caliber to simply throw off a cover album as a study in baby-boomer nostalgia, but on this album, he does so much more than that. He manages to make instrumental covers of pop songs that are interesting and genuinely enjoyable, and to cross the barrier between jazz and rock that so many other artists have tried with varied success. The album is, of course, on Spotify and iTunes, and the CD, on Okeh, shouldn't be too difficult to find as a fairly new release. There is a vinyl pressing which I would love to hear, but it's from Europe's Music on Vinyl label, whose releases are notoriously hard to get ahold of in the US. Maybe someday.