REVIEW
All About Jazz
January 26, 2011
By John Kelman
008
Here's another unusual entry—Frisell's titular group from 1996's
Quartet, but here expanded to a quintet with the addition of Don Byron,
who'd been a regular Frisell partner since the guitarist's Have a Little
Faith (Elektra/Nonesuch, 1993) and the clarinetist's own milestone, Tuskegee
Experiments (Elektra/Nonesuch, 1992). Quartet represented a significant
stylistic shift for Frisell; with the dissolution of his longstanding
trio with Kermit Drisoll and Joey Baron, the guitarist decided, at least
for a time, not to try and replace the format; instead, opting for a
rhythm section-less group with Eyvind Kang, trombonist Curtis Fowlkes
and cornetist Ron Miles.
Unlike #006, which presented an album tour that culled most of
its material from the album, here Frisell's Quartet+1 only covers four
songs from the album, looking to other sources, including a skewed New
Orleans-centric version of "The Rain in Spain," from the hit 1956 Broadway
musical My Fair Lady, with Byron's bass clarinet soaring across its full
register; a curious version of Rambler's "Strange Meeting," where Byron's
bass clarinet acts as both bass line and rhythmic anchor; and an early
version of Nashville's "We're Not From Around Here" that, again, proves
the inherent flexibility of Frisell's writing to fit into any context,
whether it's the brass-heavy version here or the more bluegrass-informed
take on the studio album from the following year.
In concert, the quartet's ability to seamlessly shift responsibilities
like a well-honed tag-team is all the more incredible for its doing so,
at least some of the time, without the benefit of structure and, instead,
from in-the-moment and intuitive decision-making. Frisell had, by this
time, struck up a friendship with The Far Side cartoon creator, Gary
Larson, and much of Quartet's music was written for a television special.
In addition to the knotty and cartoonishly melodramatic "Tales from The
Dark Side," the surprisingly ambling "Dead Ranch" and more brooding "Bob's
Monsters" are included in this hour-long set that demonstrates Frisell's
own twisted musical approach as a perfect dovetail for Larson's dry satire. -
John Kelman - All About Jazz
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About Jazz here. |
