Bill Frisell looks like someone who showed up at the wrong gig. Pianist Jason Moran is impeccably dressed in a clean, pressed shirt, lavender satin vest, shiny black shoes, the epitome of a classy Manhattan musician. Drummer Kenny Wolleson, with his geek chic, could have just stepped outside of a Williamsburg bar to have a smoke before his next PBR. And Bill Frisell? In his rumpled jacket and pants, his hair trailing off in wisps of out of control coiffure, and his round wire-rim glasses, he looks like a friendly but absent-minded professor who stumbled out of his concrete-smelling campus office and somehow wound up at the hippest joint in town.

Bill Frisell.

^{Photo by Michael Wilson}

Or maybe this on-stage visual clash—suave New York jazzer, hipster drummer, and spacey academic—just might be an accurate reflection of Frisell’s music. There are so many influences and styles into which Frisell taps that trying to describe his music in the few brief sentences allotted to most concert previewers lends itself to whack metaphors involving cocktails¹ or impossible geneaologies².

Jazz, country music, rural blues, experimental rock, contemporary classical music, American folk music, free improvisation, electronic music—all of these idioms converge in Frisell’s distinctive sound.

His trio (with Moran and Wolleson) appeared Wednesday evening at Anthology for one set, the second score in a jazz guitarist hat trick for San Diego. (Last month we heard Frisell’s contemporary John Scofield trading eights with Mulgrew Miller, and Pat Metheny and his robotic orchestra complete the trilogy on Apr. 21).

Frisell and his sidemen took the stage. He introduced Moran and Wolleson, picked up his axe, and then turned around several times to stare at the large video screen behind the stage, seeing as he watched the screen a larger-than-life-size image of him from behind looking up at the screen.

The first piece was similarly trippy—a sampled bird call, then a long pause. The sample played over again, another long pause—long enough so that most of the listeners were unsure if the music had started or not. But then Frisell moved his leg (he was triggering the loops with an effects pedal), and a new bird sample looped, and the bird songs began to grow denser. Frisell tossed in some dry, high plunks on his guitar, and soon Wolleson joined in with some bird call percussion effects. Little treble noodles on the piano added to the texture.

As the bird calls dropped out, Frisell began playing repeated musical fragments, looping them over as if he too were a bird singing out in a sunrise. Moran played his own unique musical loops, and as he did so, added a simple left hand march rhythm in the bass. As Moran’s right hand loops and left hand took over, Frisell played a long solo, and eventually the trio settled into a slow march-like groove which sounded like a jazzy interpretation of an Anglo-American folk tune. The tune slowed down a little, the groove dropped out, and then very slow musical loops spun out. This then led into a brief section where crunchy unison chords were hammered out like a rock band, and this soon dissipated into fast, nervous improvisations. If there had been folk-rock bands around in 1901, Charles Ives might have written music like this.

Frisell’s set also featured creative revampings of “Tea for Two” (played as a stop-and-start spiky piece, it sounded as if the tea was laced with speed) and “Misterioso” (a wind-up machine which jumped off the track and back on again, throwing off sparks) and a lazy country blues rendition of his own composition, “Monroe.”

Frisell is one of the outstanding interpreters of slow music. You can’t really call what he plays,“ballads.” No, they are true adagios. Other jazz musicians fill up the spaces between notes in a slow number with doodlings and chromatic chords and arpeggios. Frisell trusts his material and the way he plays it, to give you just a bare minimum of melody and chords to maximum effect. How many other jazz musicians will just let a chord or a note sound for over a second, two seconds, even three, without having to throw more stuff on top? Frisell packs every single note with meaning and significance.

Although there were several moments during his set when he went into this mode, the highlight of his adagio style came in his penultimate number, which began entirely on solo guitar played as softly as possible, later joined with tiny splashes of color from Wolleson and beautiful, elementary chords from Moran. The silence that fell over the entire club during this number—it seemed as if the bartenders stopped pouring and the waiters stayed off in the kitchen—was an eloquent testimony to the power and magic of Frisell’s art.

To play with Bill Frisell requires an eclecticism and empathy with lots of music outside of traditional jazz studies. Jason Moran laid down unadorned major and minor chords without any irony. He frequently restricted himself to the lowest registers of the keyboard to keep out of Frisell’s way, but he never sounded muddy or ungainly. His freely improvised passages were wonderfully idiomatic. When Frisell turned a chorus into a country hoedown, Moran was right there with him picking up the mood appropriately. Yet when Moran had to play a blistering bop solo, he cranked one out effortlessly.

With no bass to the ensemble, Kenny Wolleson was their rhythmic linchpin. His delicate playing during moments of spacey improvisation was well done, as was his driving drum beats and cymbal crashes during the more blatantly pop or rock moments. Wolleson spent most of the evening providing a solid backdrop to Frisell and Moran, yet when called upon to step forward, he did so convincingly.

The crowd was appreciative; after the trio’s last number, they hollered for the group to return to the stage. After a few minutes, Frisell and company took the stage again (with Frisell taking one last opportunity to marvel at the sight of himself on the screen behind the group), playing a very slow waltz, with oddly broken-up rhythms and sweetly sour notes. After a long introduction, the spaces between those asymmetrical notes were filled in, and it became clear that the trio was playing a deconstruction of Stephen Foster’s “Beautiful Dreamer.” The title of that song could well serve as poetic summation of Frisell’s music-making.

¹ Take a jigger of Bill Monroe; add a shot of Robert Fripp; pour into 3 ounces of Jim Hall; shake and serve in a chilled John Zorn glass garnished with a Robert Johnson twist.

² If Thelonius Monk and Earl Scruggs had a three-way with Carla Bley, and that offspring cavorted with Brian Eno, John Mayall, and the Roche sisters, the result would be Bill Frisell.