CULT HEROES
AVANT TRUMPETER Ambrose Akinmusire needed an encore. It was in early 2024, during a short European tour of Akinmusire’s Owl Song trio, alongside guitarist Bill Frisell and drummer Greg Hutchinson. Akinmusire called out Tenderly, a 1946 romantic waltz made a standard by the likes of Sarah Vaughan, Bill Evans, and Nat King Cole.
Frisell had to admit that – in spite of his half-century spent becoming one of music’s most distinct and influential modern guitarists – he had never played it. When the gig was done, he downloaded 50 versions. “I’ve just been obsessing over that song,” Frisell admits from his home in Brooklyn. “I’m just trying to learn.”
A Colorado clarinettist who came to guitar rather late, Frisell steadily emerged with a singular instrumental voice – patient and thoughtful, with a thin and tender tone – after a mid-’70s stint at the Berklee College of Music. Extended relationships with John Zorn and Paul Motian anchored his emergence through the ’80s. He has added his sparkling leads to the downtempo doom of Earth, gallivanted with the Ginger Baker Trio, and worked sessions for Paul Simon and Marianne Faithfull. Now 73, Frisell’s artistic core hasn’t wavered since Thelonious Monk and Gary Burton upended his high-school worldview when he saw them play a local amphitheatre on a beer-sponsored package tour: to know more music.
“I still feel the same: I’m just trying to learn and steal from everybody I can steal from, and whatever comes out is the approximation of what I’m trying to get to,” he says. “You get as close as you can. What you end up with, that’s your sound.”
That sound remains front and centre on Orchestras, a mesmerising new two-disc set that Frisell and his trio cut with dual European orchestras. It serves as a kind of greatest hits for Frisell and also a verification of his versatility. Despite the grandeur of the settings, the trio retains their improvisational vim. “At one point, the conductor looks at us and says, ‘Where are your charts?’ We didn’t need them,” he says. “We we
