Welcome to the Jazz Society of Oregon's Website

(Last Update 01/11/2012)

We are proud to be part of a vibrant Jazz community in the Pacific Northwest. On this site, you will find original articles on local clubs, musicians, and events, as well as, reviews of Jazz recordings, a great calendar and information about Jazz Society activities.

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January 2012 Highlights:
Art Resnick is the featured musician for January. Updates have been made to the jazz calendar, the upcoming events, and the CD Reviews.

Become a member and you will receive the monthly JazzScene magazine containing features and articles not available on the website. The following is an article from the January 2012 edition.

Walking in Seattle with Bill Frisell

Grammy-winning guitarist and composer will play Portland Jazz Festival

By Lynn Darroch

Bill Frisell is walking. "Hear those crows?" he asks. He's looking toward Puget Sound from his Seattle neighborhood. It's too foggy to see the water.

He's just returned from another tour.

"Yesterday, I walked for six hours," he says. "When I get home, I just start walking, and I can't stop."

The walks are part of clearing away the clutter, he says, "so I can play my guitar."

Sounds like that would be simple for Frisell, who's recorded more than 20 albums and been widely hailed as "a genius on the instrument."

But playing the guitar is "a constant struggle," he says.

"My whole life in music, I'm hearing this sound that's just beyond my grasp," he explains. "Sometimes it's very clear – like I hear John Lennon singing, and it takes over my whole body, and I'm trying to imitate it, I guess, or just get inside it and have it come out of the instrument. But you can never get it right – it's this constant grasping at something you never get.

"I used to think, years and years ago, that there was a point you'd get to -- if you practiced really hard and did all the right things -- where you'd feel music flowing out of you, it'd be this constant ecstasy.

"But it feels the same today as when I first picked up the instrument," he adds. "You have to find a way to be comfortable with that, you have to embrace it."

Maybe that's what has made him such a productive artist. His "Unspeakable" won a Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Jazz Album in 2005; two others have received Grammy nominations. His songs have been on the soundtracks of several movies, including "Finding Forrester" and "Million Dollar Hotel." In addition to albums under his name, Frisell has collaborated on many jazz, classical and world music recordings. He has performed the work of all sorts of American composers, from Aaron Copland to Muddy Waters, and has written soundtracks for three Buster Keaton films. At age 60, it's apparent that he has become an important American composer as well as an instrumentalist.

It started 40 years ago, when he first studied with Jim Hall.

"He'd give me these ways of looking at possibilities for voicing chords," recalls Frisell. "If I'd tried to go through all those possibilities and tried to learn them before I even played a song, I never would have played a song. There's a point at which you just have to play some music."

Hall opened the door to many possibilities for Frisell. "A ton of stuff," he says, "a lot of it was an attitude.When I met him, I was thinking about the guitar as an instrument itself, and I saw how he was getting his ideas from other instruments. That was the beginning of taking my attention away from the guitar and just thinking about music in general, and putting my attention toward the band.

"That's where my philosophy comes from" he adds. "And that's where I get the most enjoyment -- out of playing with other people. When everyone's focused on everyone else in the band, then the music just takes off, you just go into this amazing world."

Maybe that's why it took him so long to become comfortable as a solo artist. (Frisell will play a solo set before his appearance with the 858 Quartet on the second of his two nights at the Portland Jazz Festival, scheduled for February 17-26.)

"It's my biggest challenge," he says "It's true, I can play whatever I want. But when you play alone, an idea and it goes out in the air and it's gone. But with other people, you play something, and it comes back; there'll be some reaction from somebody in the band, and you take that, and it starts this circle going. For me, the hardest thing about playing alone is to be comfortable with that space. When I first started, I'd get in a panic; I'd play something and think I had to play something else right away to fill in those terrifying moments of silence."

Whether alone or in one of his many ensembles, though, Frisell's music is built on melody.

"That's the real architecture of the song we're playing. Looking back at all the masters, my heroes in the music, the melody's always there, like Thelonious Monk and Sonny Rollins, even Coltrane and guys who get incredibly abstract, you can hear that the skeleton is there, no matter how far away it goes. It's like the melody becomes part of their blood, so whatever else they do, it gives it a form and a meaning."

The crows again rise with woody cries. I hear a clarinet – Frisell's first instrument.

"That also had an effect on what I play on guitar," he says, "just the feeling of the breath. And I did experience playing in bands and orchestras and woodwind quintets … just that sensibility of playing with acoustic instruments and having blend and balance – that affected me a lot."

In fact, he says, the gear he's added has been primarily an attempt to get the sound of other instruments from his guitar.

"I was jealous of piano players who can put their foot on the sustain pedal, or hold a note while they play other notes," he explains. "That led me to get a delay pedal. And the distortion came from thinking about the sound of the trumpet: sort of buzzing, kind of intense."

His latest album, "All We Are Saying …," sets a bigger challenge: to evoke -- with guitar -- the voice and lyrics of John Lennon.

"There's the lyrics and also the sound of the voice, not just the words," he says. "Whenever I play a song, like an Aretha Franklin or Hank Williams or Sam Cooke song, many times in my mind I'm hearing the sound of that person's voice. I'm trying to mimic it on the guitar."

A constant struggle; he'll never reach the end of it, as he learned one night from Bill Evans.

"He was one of my biggest heroes, and he played in this little bar in Denver around 1971," Frisell recalls. "I went every night with my friends, and we couldn't believe how glorious this music was, we were just being transported. One night, 2:00 in the morning, there's Bill Evans standing in the street, completely lost and alone, and he said, 'Hey, can you give me a ride to my hotel?' And on the way, we tell him how amazing the music was, and he's moping around and saying, 'Man, this whole week I haven't been able to get anything happening, I can't get it to work.'

"I was stunned. 'How can that be after what I've just heard?' And then a light went on, and I went, 'Oh, this is it; I guess I'm gonna feel this way my whole life."

And he has, on an endless quest to express the sounds in his imagination on the guitar.

First, he walks. Fog hides Puget Sound. A flock of crows takes noisy flight.

Bill Frisell plays the music of John Lennon as well as the music of Speedy West and Jimmy Bryant on Friday, February 24. On Saturday, February 25, he will play solo and with the 858 Quartet.

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