BILL FRISELL – IN MY DREAMS

Trapped In The Sky (Bill Frisell) 2:07
When We Go (Bill Frisell) 7:52
In My Dreams (Bill Frisell) 5:12
Isfahan (Duke Ellington/Billy Strayhorn) 6:33
Give Me A Home (Bill Frisell) 2:53
Why? (Bill Frisell) 3:17
Curtis (A Year And A Day) (Bill Frisell) 7:24
Hard Times (Stephen Foster) 4:42
Again (Bill Frisell) 6:16
Small Hands (Bill Frisell) 6:19
Never Too Late (Bill Frisell) 4:06
Home On The Range (Daniel E. Kelly/Brewster M. Higley) 5:37

Bill Frisell: Electric and Acoustic Guitars, Loops / Thomas Morgan: Bass / Rudy Royston: Drums

Jenny Scheinman: Violin / Eyvind Kang: Viola / Hank Roberts: Cello

Produced by Lee Townsend

Arranged by Bill Frisell

1/5/7: Recorded by Joseph Branciforte at Roulette Intermedium, Brooklyn, NY February 8, 2025

6/11: Recorded by Nick Lloyd at Firehouse 12, New Haven, CT on February 6, 2025

2/3/4/8/9/10/12: Recorded by Kevin Lee at The Newman Center, Denver, CO on April 3, 2025

Mixed and edited by Adam Muñoz at Opus Studios, Berkeley, CA

Bill Frisells neuestes Projekt „In My Dreams“ ist eine Art Familientreffen, das einige der engsten Freunde des gefeierten Gitarristen in einem einzigartigen Sextett vereint: Thomas Morgan am Bass, Rudy Royston am Schlagzeug, Jenny Scheinman an der Violine, Eyvind Kang an der Bratsche und Hank Roberts am Cello. Ihre musikalische Geschichte reicht Jahrzehnte zurück, doch noch nie zuvor spielten sie in dieser gemeinsamen Konstellation. Zusammen erkunden sie die vielfältigen Facetten amerikanischer Musik, darunter Frisell-Originale sowie Klassiker des Jazz und der Americana. Das von Lee Townsend produzierte Album erscheint aus Anlass von Frisells 75. Geburtstag am 18. März.

Man kann „In My Dreams“ als Gipfeltreffen zweier Kerngruppen betrachten. Die erste ist das Trio des Gitarristen mit Thomas Morgan und Rudy Royston, das erstmals auf Frisells LP „When You Wish Upon A Star“ von 2016 zu hören war. Die zweite ist Frisells bevorzugte Streichersektion, bestehend aus Jenny Scheinman, Eyvind Kang und Hank Roberts, die vor 20 Jahren auf dem Album „Richter 858“ debütierte.

Die Basis des Albums wurde 2025 live bei Konzerten in Brooklyn, Denver und New Haven aufgenommen. Für einen Teil der Songs fanden unter der Leitung von Tonmeister Adam Muñoz in den Opus Studios in Berkeley, Kalifornien, zusätzliche Aufnahmen statt – und zwar nicht nur Overdubs, sondern ganze Abschnitte und Klanglandschaften. Das Ergebnis ist eine brillante Hybridaufnahme, die die Spontaneität einer Live-Performance nahtlos mit der geschliffenen Klangkunst verbindet, die nur im Studio erreicht werden kann.

INFO

The guitarist and composer Bill Frisell — a “mild-mannered maverick [who] has made a colossal impact,” per the New Yorker — likes to remember a dream he had that transformed the way he thinks about music and his instrument. It occurred more than three decades ago, but Frisell, 74, can recall it today as if he just snapped awake, roused by a mix of fright and awe.

In the dream, Frisell enters a darkened building, traverses a stairwell and finds himself in a breathtaking library surrounded by stacks of leather-bound volumes and antiquities. At the center of the room is a table, and seated around the table are several monk-like figures in hoods. They seem forbidding at first, but quickly reveal themselves as warm and welcoming. “We want to show you what things really are,” they say. “First, we’d like to show you what colors really look like.”

Frisell narrates: “So they open this little box and take out these small blocks. They point to one and say, ‘This is what red looks like.’ And it’s the most intense, beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. Then they say, ‘We know you’re a musician, so we’d like you to hear what real music sounds like.’ It felt like some sort of tube was going into my forehead and moving around, and it was the most incredible sound I’d ever heard. Nino Rota, Thelonious Monk, Sonny Rollins, Charles Ives, Jimi Hendrix, Hank Williams, Andrés Segovia, Robert Johnson — all this music I love, but all the parts were crystal clear. And then I woke up.”

Ever since, Frisell has been chasing the ideal of purity and vibrancy he experienced that evening in twilight. And he’s gotten closer than ever with the group of trusted collaborators he’s reassembled for In My Dreams, his exquisite new Blue Note album comprising covers and original music. “There have been times, over the years,” Frisell says, “where I’d be playing with these guys and it felt like I was approaching that dream I had all those years ago, where all that music was happening simultaneously.”

One way to see In My Dreams is as a meeting of two core groups. The first is the guitarist’s trio with bassist Thomas Morgan and drummer Rudy Royston, which first appeared on Frisell’s 2016 LP When You Wish Upon a Star. The second is Frisell’s go-to string section, for lack of a better term, featuring violist Eyvind Kang, violinist Jenny Scheinman and cellist Hank Roberts, which debuted as a unit 20 years ago on Richter 858, a series of improvised meditations on the work of the German artist Gerhard Richter.

A more accurate way to describe the lineup is to say that these are some of Bill Frisell’s favorite musicians, who’ve crisscrossed in his performances and recordings for decades. To name just two examples of many, Kang and Royston were part of Frisell’s trio Beautiful Dreamers, and the entire ensemble sans Morgan appeared on his 2013 album Big Sur. The chemistry here runs deep: Frisell first met Roberts half a century ago, when the guitarist was a student at Berklee and the cellist worked for the school as a chef. Says Frisell, “Throughout all these years, this group has just been sort of popping up as my guys, you know?”

But it’d been a minute since he’d gathered most of them together for a recording project; in fact, the last time most of these players coalesced on record was Big Sur. “I went off in a bunch of different directions,” he says, “and then it just came to me how much I was really missing those guys.”

As Frisell explains more than once, these are the loveliest people, with whom he’s nurtured familial connections. “On the road, the concert takes a couple hours, but you’re together for days before that and after,” he says. “We’ve spent a lot of time in airports, being hungry together.” Frisell chuckles, but that togetherness manifests nightly in the music, in a strikingly impressive way. Communication on the bandstand can mean a simple series of glances and head nods; new solos or ideas about song form can materialize based on sheer shared intuition. With that level of telepathy in play, Frisell’s arrangements can be fluid and loose-limbed. “Everyone is shifting their roles constantly, especially the strings,” Frisell says. “Whatever’s on the bottom doesn’t necessarily have to be the cello.”

That faith is evident throughout In My Dreams, which employs a similarly elastic and inspired approach to production, through the oversight of Lee Townsend and veteran engineer Adam Muñoz. All of the core tracks were recorded live in 2025, at concerts in Brooklyn, Denver and New Haven. For certain songs, additional recording took place under Muñoz’s guidance at Opus Studios, in Berkeley, Calif. — and not simple note corrections, but full sections and soundscapes. The result is an ingenious hybrid recording, flawlessly melding the spontaneity of live performance with the sonic craft that can only be achieved in the studio.

Half of In My Dreams comprises new, previously unrecorded original music, including such delights as the title track, a dead ringer for the seductive anxiety of Bernard Herrmann’s Hitchcock scores. (It also summons up the score that Frisell contributed to Gus Van Sant’s Psycho remake.) Herrmann, says Frisell, is “huge for me,” and lists him as an influence in composing and arranging alongside Nino Rota, Michael Gibbs, Jonny Greenwood and others. But there’s also something uniquely Frisellian about all of this new writing, from the opening “Trapped in the Sky,” an exercise in noirish harmony for violin and viola, to “Curtis (a year and a day),” an uncanny tribute to the beloved trombonist Curtis Fowlkes, written with Kang’s sound in mind.

The other half of this double LP includes songs — covers as well as originals — that he’s returned to over the years, drawing from them new possibilities or dialing back his advanced reharmonizations in favor of unfettered melody. “Isfahan,” which Frisell has never before included on a proper album, allows the guitarist to pay homage to Billy Strayhorn, a pathbreaking genius he’s been increasingly fascinated by over the past two decades. “When I hear his music, it’s like, ‘How can a human being exist on this level?’” Frisell says. “I feel like I spent my whole life just touching on that song, and it took me forever to get to the point where I could actually play it on a gig.”

Other album highlights — “Hard Times,” “Home on the Range,” Frisell’s interpolation of the latter, titled “Give Me a Home” — deliver the guitarist’s trademark vision of America as a dreamlike antique mall, a surreal signature aesthetic born of personal history. Of “Home on the Range,” he says, “I grew up in Colorado, so that’s one of those songs that was probably somehow filtering in when I was in the womb. It’s just been around my whole life.” “When We Go,” which debuted on the guitarist’s 1985 ECM album, Rambler, resurfaces here like an archaeological revelation — early evidence of that instantly identifiable Frisell soundworld, at once folksy, whimsical, smart and daringly progressive.

“When We Go” will continue to evolve, expand and improve, as all of Frisell’s music does in the hands of his cherished colleagues. “I’ve got more gigs lined up with this ensemble,” he says, “and I just know that at that first gig, I’m going to say, ‘I wish we had that on the record!’ That always happens.”

“That was the big idea here,” he adds. “Like, I just want to get my friends all together and do that, you know?”

KONZERTE BILL FRISELL TRIO

29.01.26 Dortmund – Domicil

02.02.26 Berlin – Zig Zag

04.02.26 München – Unterfahrt

05.02.26 Köln – Stadtgarten

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