Guitarist Bill Frisell lets his strings do the talking.

By Jim Sullivan
Berklee.edu Correspondent
November 30, 2006

Bill Frisell talks about his music and his life with students at the Berklee Performance Center.
Photo by Nick Balkin

Frisell was born in Baltimore, grew up in Colorado, and listened to the Beatles and Jimi Hendrix as a kid. His first instrument was clarinet, but as a budding guitarist, he discovered Chicago bluesmen like Buddy Guy and B.B. King and jazzer Wes Montgomery.

"Early on, I was drawn to it," Frisell said of music. "There was never a real clear moment where I said I'm going to play for the rest of my life."

Frisell studied music at the University of Northern Colorado and enrolled at Berklee in 1971. "I came to the big city, Boston," he said, "and it scared me to death and I ran back home. I didn't seem to fit in too well." He studied on his own and learned from guitarist Jim Hall back in Colorado. He then returned to Berklee in 1975 to study arranging and composition. "It kicked in better, clicked," he said. "I stayed a couple of years and got to play a lot in clubs."

Moving to New York in 1979, Frisell recorded for the jazz label ECM with a variety of musicians, playing acoustic and electric guitar. He made his instrument scream and sing, and recorded under his own name first in 1984. He also became part of the avant-garde community, playing with John Zorn. "It was radically different than the way I had been thinking about music . . . like having my brain sliced up into a million pieces."

Over the years, Frisell has recorded with Elvis Costello, Marianne Faithfull, and Suzanne Vega, among many others. He's recorded several soundtracks, including the Psycho remake and Wim Wenders's The Million Dollar Hotel. He's been with Nonesuch since 1992 and embraces the freedom he's been given, praising the label's faith in him: "I look at all of my records as one piece of music," he said, "and I know that's a luxury."

Frisell mused about the scads of great press he's received over the years. Rolling Stone, for instance, described his music as "strange meetings of the mysterious and the earthy, the melancholy and the giddy." He said he found it amusing that when he went to Nashville to play bluegrass, he finally got slammed, presumably for slumming. The irony? It was one of the most "risky, scary things to do."

The Berklee students posed questions, and Frisell gave discursive, thoughtful responses, often ending with "Did that answer your question?" But sometimes there were questions Frisell knew he couldn't tackle. Asked about harmonizing lines, he said, "There's not just one system I can show you."

Of the writing process, Frisell said, "I've gotten to a point with playing where it's more instinctual. I'm trying to get the writing to the same point. But it's like playing in slow motion." He spoke of writing pages and pages of stream-of-consciousness melodies on paper, and then pruning and discarding. "More often than not, the melody comes first. Groups of melody and harmony will come out at the same time, and ideas will grow out of that." Developing your own distinctive tone, he added, was "just a natural human endeavor."

Frisell talked about and demonstrated his array of effects pedals—pedals to distort, loop, delay, or bump sounds up a notch—but cautioned that the music "doesn't really come from them, it comes from your brain. I'd like to think that anyway." But Frisell acknowledged that even a musical mind such as his can get knotted in frustration.

"There are so many moments when you get discouraged. Thirty-five, forty years of playing and there's stuff I still haven't gotten together," said Frisell, who played stirring solo renditions of three tunes during his clinic: Ira Gershwin's "My Man's Gone Now," Hank Williams's "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry," and Thelonious Monk's "Crepuscule with Nellie."

Grammy winner Frisell has played with the likes of Elvis Costello, Marianne Faithfull, and Suzanne Vega. Photo by Nick Balkin

Frisell described one of the most pivotal events in his musical life. He caught a week's worth of gigs in Denver by the legendary pianist Bill Evans in the early '70s. Frisell and friends were leaving a gig late, when they spotted Evans in the street. He had evidently lost his bearings and didn't know where his hotel was. Frisell offered to drive him, and Evans accepted. Frisell had been blown away by the show, but he remembered an angry Evans saying, "I couldn't play [anything] tonight."

"I said 'What?!' And I realize that feeling never goes away. That's part of the deal."

Near the end of the clinic, a student said he hesitated to call Frisell a jazz artist, considering all the genres he played and the aesthetics he employed. How did Frisell see himself?

He paused. "That was a big question. Jazz. What's jazz? I actually think of myself more as a jazz musician, like Monk and Charlie Parker, the way they took inspiration around them and made something personal about it. I try to use what I experience and process it. Jazz is the only way I can describe what it is." Anyway, "music isn't about all these categories . . . I don't go in for that higher/lower thing. It doesn't register with me."

Jim Sullivan is a Boston-based freelance writer.