Bill Frisell Trio and the KSO

This article is about the most eclectic, electric, and eccentric guitarist alive. An artist with no equal. A musician who plays guitar from the inside out, not, like everyone else, from the outside in. He may own several dozen of them, but he doesn’t collect guitars. Guitars collect him.

Last Sunday's Coffee Concert

But first I want to mention something that happened last Sunday. Oak Ridge Civic Music Association (ORCMA) presented one of its perfectly fitting coffee concerts at the Chapel on the Hill, a delightful program by the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra (KSO) Music and Wellness Quartet. From the Smetana string quartet to the tango by Carlos Gardel, with Mark O’Connor’s “Appalachian Waltz” in between, Josh Ulrich on viola, Stacy Nickell on cello, and Sean Claire and Zofia Glashauser on violins filled the historic chapel with the promise of spring and a deep breath of this great little city’s musical vitality.

I took my kids to this concert. We sat right up front where six decades ago my parents and my six siblings filled an entire 16-foot pew to hear Dr. Jim Spicer’s Sunday sermons. (He turns 93 on Friday. Happy Birthday, Jim!)

During the Smetana, my 7-year-old son thought Josh Ulrich was crying as he played his viola. During the O’Connor waltz, my 9-year-old son was startled to feel the cello in his chest. And during the Gardel tango, my 5-year-old daughter told me she thought Zofia Glashauser played violin like a ballerina.

I thought so too.

Afterward, at coffee hour, I got a chance to meet ORCMA’s newly appointed conductor, Régulo Stabilito, who told me he has a gig at the Big Ears Festival.

He will be conducting a performance of the gutsy saxophonist Greg Tardy’s musical adventure, “The Journey: A Pilgrim’s Progress Suite,” inspired by the 345-year-old allegory written by Puritan preacher John Bunyan. “A Pilgrim’s Progress” is a literary masterpiece which has inspired artists ranging from opera composer Vaughan Williams to novelist Wole Soyinka.

I’ll write more about Maestro Stabilito and the brilliant Greg Tardy’s collaboration next week. But when the piece debuted a year ago by the Knoxville Jazz Orchestra on “Live at Lucille’s,” presented by East Tennessee’s PBS station on a South Arts/Jazz Road grant from the Doris Duke Foundation, it was a realization of Tardy’s spiritual focus, on equal footing with his jazz focus, and a dazzling braiding of both.

And now about Bill Frisell

Tardy, an associate professor at the University of Tennessee's School of Music, has also worked extensively with guitarist Bill Frisell, the subject of this Big Ears artist profile. Their 2019 Newvelle Records duet album “More Than Enough” was described in the journal Audiophile Audition as “impeccable,” “exquisite,” and “gorgeous,” “an intuitive pairing of artists that listen and respond.”

So, let’s listen to Bill Frisell.

At the height of the Vietnam War, in 1968, when he was 17, Bill Frisell was taken to the Red Rocks amphitheater outside Denver by his dad to see a touring jazz show put together by George Wein’s Newport Jazz Festival. It was Bill’s first exposure to artists like Larry Coryell, Gary Burton, and Steve Swallow. And like every healthy pre-draft age teen in the late ‘60s, he started collecting their records.

For context and comparison to the riches of the Big Ears Festival in 2023, the four-day Newport Jazz Festival in 1968 featured performances by Nina Simone, Count Basie, Dionne Warwick, Duke Ellington, Hugh Masekela, Ray Charles, Clark Terry, Elvin Jones, Archie Shepp, Roland Kirk, Horace Silver, Ramsey Lewis, Wes Montgomery, Woody Herman and Dizzy Gillespie, with thanks to the Joseph Schlitz Brewing company for making it all possible.

Boom.

Bill quickly discovered a common thread running through his vinyl treasures. As he told me this past Monday, “There was some guy named Mike Gibbs who wrote half the songs on these records.”

In 1975, when Bill enrolled at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, Mike was Berklee’s composer-in-residence.

Three years later, Gibbs hired the blossoming guitarist for a string of concerts in the United Kingdom by a jazz ensemble he directed. And thus began a lifelong connection that is made manifest at Big Ears 2023, because Mike is the arranger for Bill’s audacious experiment with the KSO.

“Mike Gibbs has been hugely important in my life,” Frisell told me. “It’s criminal that he’s not more known to people. ‘Sweet Rain’ by Stan Getz, one of my favorite records ever ... Mike Gibbs wrote that tune.”

But the KSO project is only one of Bill’s contributions to Big Ears. It’s the nature of this Festival that artists are free and encouraged to connect, interact, and perform together any way they can. And no one does that better than Bill. Take this tip: don’t miss his performance with Charles Lloyd. Or his work with John Zorn. Or his ballets with Julian Lage. And he might drop in on Greg Tardy. Trust me ... nobody gets the magic of Big Ears like Bill Frisell.

I saw him several times at Big Ears 2022. But nothing will ever compare to his performance at The Bijou in memory of his friend Ron Miles.

“Ron was one of the most important people in my life. We played together for 30 years. I could lean on him so hard," he said.

In 2017, a jazz quintet described by “All About Jazz” as “five beautiful and intrepid souls” released an album called “I Am a Man.” The compositions were by Ron Miles, the deeply gifted cornet and trumpet artist based in Denver. And he was joined in this project by four of his best friends, in a milieu that values friendship more than any other category or pedigree. They included drummer Brian Blade, bassist Thomas Morgan, pianist Jason Moran, and Bill Frisell.

The album includes one of the most insistently plaintive jazz compositions I’ve ever heard, “Is There Room in Your Heart For a Man Like Me?” When I first heard it a year ago, my marriage was disintegrated right before my eyes. So this tune, and this album “I Am a Man,” now occupy a space within me that encapsulates emotions I hope will never come back to the surface. But this ache got worse.

I had listened to “I Am a Man” because Ron Miles and his collaborators were coming to Big Ears 2022. But on March 8 last year, Miles died unexpectedly from a rare blood cancer. Polycythemia vera. His death was a shock to the entire jazz world, and to the Big Ears family.

So on March 26, the Ron Miles Quintet was on stage at The Bijou to play a set of his music ... without him.

Miles’ wife sent Frisell a scrap of paper on which he had scribbled the outline of a melody the morning before he died, and his bandmates filled out those scribbles at The Bijou.

“I think I’ve played it at almost every show I’ve done since then,” Bill told me. “Music is just so extraordinary, because when someone like Ron is gone, that sound is going to always be here. He is in me somehow. Like Paul Motian. Like Burt Bacharach. They’re still here, inside me.”

Did you hear that? Artists always tell you things that surprise them as much as they surprise you. That’s what it means to be an artist.

Festival passholders will have at least six opportunities to hear Bill and his eager cohorts in various configurations at Big Ears. Like I’ve said before, as far as jazz guitar is concerned, he’s the hardest working man in show business.

With the Knoxville Symphony, Bill and his trio, bassist Thomas Morgan and drummer Rudy Royston, will perform some of his best known tunes as arranged by Mike Gibbs. This grows out of the decades-long Gibbs-Frisell symbiosis, but its initial form appeared 10 years ago when Gibbs paired Bill with the utterly extraordinary NDR Big Band, based in Hamburg, Germany. The result was “Play a Bill Frisell Set List,” one of the most perfectly realized jazz albums ever recorded. Its internal energy will flat out knock your socks off.

Six months ago, Gibbs was at it again, matching Frisell and his trio partners with the Brussels Philharmonic in Belgium to launch his arrangements into low Earth orbit. The results were so striking, the next step was obvious. “You know ... we’re going to be at Big Ears in the spring. Have you ever heard the KSO and Aram Demirjian? They’re awesome.”

So picture this: the most nimbly creative guitar genius you’ll ever hear, with his most trusted bassist and drummer who know what he’s thinking before he thinks it, together with the one orchestra in America daring enough to embrace these guys as equals in the pursuit of musical magic.

I can’t wait to see the look on Aram Demirjian’s face when he lifts his baton. Only at Big Ears. Only in Knoxville.

John Job is a longtime Oak Ridge resident and frequent contributor to The Oak Ridger.

This article originally appeared on Oakridger: Bill Frisell Trio, KSO to perform at Big Ears