When listening to one of the hundreds of recordings featuring guitarist Bill Frisell as a leader or a sideman, it’s easy to visualize the expansiveness of the West and Colorado, where he grew up in the ’50s and ’60s.
His solos – quick-draw and off-kilter – could serve as a soundtrack for a surrealist comic Western featuring, say, a guy staggering around in a Godzilla suit.
Though it has been decades since he attended Denver’s East High or the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley, there’s a distinctly Colorado feeling about Frisell’s guitar.
“It’s weird,” Frisell, 55, said in a recent interview with The Denver Post. “People always said, especially when I was on the East Coast, that I was about the ‘wide open spaces’ and all this stuff, but I don’t know. I mean, I grew up in the middle of Denver.”
Frisell, who lives in the Seattle area, appears as part of a powerhouse trio with drummer/pianist Jack DeJohnette and bassist Jerome Harris at the Boulder Theater on Sunday.
Even though he didn’t come of age on that windswept prairie he seemingly evokes, Frisell acknowledges that there’s something about Colorado that helped him forge his pliable high lonesome sound.
“Every time I go back, just the air and there’s this thing with the sky,” he said. “Everything’s bigger and wider, and there’s just the smell of the air. It really affects me a lot. I can’t say specifically what. There are so many things that determine what you end up playing.”
Frisell might come off as a touch spacey in conversation, but his voice seems to be an extension of the guitar artistry that made a wide impression with his 1984 album, “Rambler” (ECM), which established him as a soloist with likably eccentric sensibilities.
In the more than 20 years since, he has stuck to his own vision, collaborating with musicians as diverse as Elvis Costello, Vic Chestnutt and John Zorn, with Frisell serving as axman for the saxophonists’ slash and burn hardcore/improv band Naked City.
In recent years, he has played with such jazz elder statesman as bassist Ron Carter and drummer Paul Motian. The trio recently put out a thoughtful yet cartoonish set of music encompassing the compositions of Thelonious Monk and Hank Williams on the Nonesuch label. That project was last month for Frisell; it’s time to focus on what’s coming up.
“To get to play with Jack DeJohnette, I can’t even believe it,” Frisell said. “As soon as I became aware of jazz in any way, he was right there. He was on one of the very first albums I got with Miles Davis. He’s been one of my larger-than-life heroes.”
Sunday’s performance stems from “The Elephant Sleeps But Still Remembers,” a live recording DeJohnette and Frisell made in 2001 that was recently released on the drummer’s own Golden Beams label. The album is an ecstatic free-for-all exuding humor and intensity.
With the addition of Harris, (“We used to play together so much in the ’70s and ’80s, so it’s a reunion for him and me too,” said Frisell) Sunday’s show promises to be a memorable night for exploratory jazz.
Frisell always draws a crowd when he plays in Colorado. He remains in close contact with a couple of local players: guitarist Dale Bruning and trumpeter Ron Miles.
“I don’t even know if I’d be playing music if I hadn’t met him,” Frisell says of Bruning, an early teacher who remains an occasional collaborator. “He opened up the whole world to me.”
And Miles is a kindred spirit to Frisell. “All summer we were touring, and we’ll be playing more (together) in Europe. Any chance I get to play with him, I do.”
Frisell’s music operates, for the most part, beyond categorization, which makes it all the more intriguing. But improvisation is a powerful factor in virtually everything he has recorded, and, often, in the ability to swing and produce infinite variations on the blues.
For all this range, he must be regarded as a jazz musician.
“I don’t know what it (jazz) means,” he said after a considerable pause and a laugh. “I guess everyone has their own definition of what that is, and for me, it fits better for anything else.”
“Jazz is not limiting. It was always wide open and everything was possible; the place where you could try anything. For me, that fits pretty good.”
Bret Saunders writes about jazz for The Denver Post. Saunders is host of the “KBCO Morning Show,” 5:30-10 a.m. weekdays at 97.3-FM. His e-mail address is Bret Saunders bret_saunders@hotmail.com
Jack DeJohnette, Bill Frisell and Jerome Harris
JAZZ|Boulder Theater, 2032 14th St. 8 p.m. Sunday; all ages| $24-$34|Call 303-786-7030.
Information at bouldertheater.com.
