Bill Frisell with Music for Strings in Neuhardenberg, Germany: Jenny Scheinman, Eyvind Kang, Bill Frisell and Hank Roberts. Photo credit: Claudia Engelhart

Bill Frisell: Music For Strings

Stockholm Jazz Festival

Grunewaldsalen Konserthuset

Stockholm, Sweden

October 17

The setting was personal, a 400-seat room, ornamented by historic sculpture and painting, floor to ceiling, the acoustics in this all-wood interior ideal for a “music for strings” concert. This Grunewaldsalen is all part of the larger Konserthuset, where one can hear the Stockholm Symphony and see the Nobel prizes awarded each year. Having left Mantova, Italy, at 3am that very morning, guitarist Bill Frisell was on a European tour with his “string group” of Hank Roberts, cello, violist Eyvind Kang and violinist Jennie Scheinman. (For those sitting close enough, a group of stuffed animals could be seen at the foot of one of the group’s Fender amps on stage.)

As with many Frisell concerts, and as the four sat chamber-style and began playing, it kinda sounded like they were warming up, Bill’s drone-like patterns suggesting his guitar needed tuning. But as the music proceeded it became apparent that the concert was well underway, Roberts’ cello early on providing the bottom end with his ever-ready plucking, while Kang and Scheinman bowed support. Unlike the scabrous, red and orange colors of his Richter 858 project with the group, this concert started out as a slow, mesmerizing mesh of all four players playing something approximating a dirge, leading into a slow blues, and then … it was Fats Waller’s “Jitterbug Waltz.” True to form, “Jitterbug” was played at a medium tempo, nary a solo in sight. The group teased out Waller’s infectious melody as Frisell strummed amidst the strings’ cascading waltz lines.

Here and there were heard traces of bebop, each player of course adept at playing the scales up and down when they weren’t dropping in on a little rock & roll, featuring some Frisellian surf-guitar sound. From the fanfare of such goings-on the quartet emerged with the Miles Davis-Bill Evans classic “Blue In Green” in a rendition that was as meditative as the original, only this time with their completely different instrumentation. Music For Strings, if it was about anything, was and is about the transparency of music once heard within certain idioms but now played in refreshingly new ways, “Blue In Green” sounding as tender, immediate and authentic as if it were their own.

From there it was variations on “Three Blind Mice.” Were they re-tuning up? Breaking some kind of tension? Just having fun? If there was any doubt, in response they all rode off into some kind of sunset (or so it seemed) with the tv-cowboy music of “The Theme From ‘Bonanza,’” Frisell covering Tommy Tedesco’s electric-guitar sound like a saddle on your favorite horse. One of the tunes from Frisell’s upcoming album When You Wish Upon A Star, “Bonanza” was played straight with nary a divergence from the Ponderosa, once again the three supporting string players reveling right along with Bill, grins included.

Encores for this enthusiastic full house came from two different eras, the first via a slightly disguised, reharmonized version of Stephen Stills’ 1966 ode “For What It’s Worth,”the theme creeping through some deeply ingrained playing by all four members. The concert ended on a romantic, lushly chromatic note with David Raskin’s title song to the movie The Bad And The Beautiful, from 1952 (a song also performed on When You Wish Upon A Star). It was here that the group shined most brightly, the song’s intricate chordal structure and unusual octave jumps ideal vantage points from which to hear each player’s respective instrumental fluencies even as they remained within the lovely confines of this most lovely of songs. Music For Strings made for a very musical evening, one that was over all too soon.