Jazz Great Bill Frisell Wants To Be Surprised

Bill Frisell has fine-tuned the tension in his life.

That’s not to suggest his existence is somehow fraught — far from it; his demeanor is contemplative, avuncular, searching — but rather the 73-year-old Grammy-winning jazz great understands the value of both motion and stillness.

“I’ve actually pretty much been home for the last few weeks,” Frisell says during a recent conversation from his Brooklyn base. “Playing is the main thing that keeps me sane, I think. But I also need — right now, I’m trying to prepare music for what’s coming up and write. ... So many things develop, even in the ideas for writing and contemplation, all that happens while we’re traveling and playing together, but there’s also this time where I just need to sit there by myself and ponder things. I think they feed each other.”

That tension finds its release, whether onstage or off, in the element of surprise, which, more than any other component of the Maryland native’s life and work, appears to be the driving force behind his endlessly inventive playing, inspired collaborations and extraordinary longevity in multiple genres.

Whether composing at home or standing in the spotlight, not knowing what lies ahead is what Frisell loves above all else.

“I want to be challenged,” Frisell says. “I want to be surprised. Everything I do, I’m hoping to be able to feel safe enough to take a chance and take a leap into something. The main thing with music is trying to stay in that place where you’re not sure — it gets scary sometimes, you know, but you don’t want to be so certain about what’s going to happen.

“The best stuff happens when you really don’t know, but if you’re with people that you trust and feel safe with, then you can jump off into this unknown, and that’s where the real amazing stuff happens.”

When Frisell takes his next leap into the unknown, he’ll do so on stage at the Arlington Music Hall on Jan. 23, where his 2025 touring schedule begins in earnest. (The local date will also be a rarity; Frisell does not often pass this way — according to his own tour archive, he last played North Texas over a decade ago, in May 2014, stopping at Dan's Silverleaf in Denton.)

Although he’ll be performing alongside trusted, longtime creative partners Thomas Morgan and Rudy Royston in a trio configuration in North Texas, his itinerary over the coming months is as expansive as his pairing with an orchestra or as cozy as his trio gigs.

That elasticity is a hallmark of the acclaimed guitarist’s career to date, which now stretches back over more than four decades of output. To even try to list a portion of his discography would take another few thousand words — the dictionary should swap out its definition of “prolific” for a headshot of Frisell.

To wit: Frisell has released more than 40 albums under his own name, stretching back to his 1983 solo debut In Line.

That number doesn’t include his series of more than 20 live, download-only albums, or the more than 20 collaborative albums he’s crafted with everyone from Elvis Costello and Petra Haden to Vernon Reid and Jack DeJohnette, or the 19 albums he made with Paul Motian and Joe Lovano, or the more than a dozen albums he made with John Zorn, or the half dozen records he cut with Zorn’s avant-garde group Naked City.

Did we mention his featured guest spots — dating back to 1978 or so — for an astonishingly eclectic array of artists, ranging from Bob Moses and Lyle Mays to Norah Jones and Bonnie Raitt?

“Most of the time, people know me, and they want me as a person they know, and there’s a kind of freedom in that,” Frisell says. “Someone sets up a world for me to be in, and then they just let me go. I’ve been lucky with that. It’s not like they call me to be somebody else.”

When it comes to calling his own shots, however, Frisell is no less himself.
“If it’s my thing or if I’m writing the music, then there’s that whole weight of that,” Frisell says. “I don’t have a fixed, specific idea of exactly what I want it to be [but] there’s some kind of something that made it come out, something in my imagination. ... I write a melody that I heard in my head, and then I hear someone else play it — that can really surprise you, like the way they would come at it, in a way you’d never thought of yourself.”

To engender that sense of discovery, however, Frisell is clear that trust and comfort are crucial. His trio performance in Arlington, alongside bassist Morgan and drummer Royston, both of whom he’s known for decades, promises a firm foundation for any manner of musical revelation.

“Those are two of my closest friends,” Frisell says of Morgan and Royston. “It’s hard to describe what that [chemistry] is. I talk about it, but then I hate talking about it, because it’s almost like I don’t want to break the spell. When [Morgan] is playing, it feels like — it’s almost like a physical sensation — like his hands are connected to my hands or something. ... Same with Rudy. There’s no talking or figuring anything out — everything just happens.”

Frisell, who began playing clarinet as a child before switching to guitar as a teenager in Denver, where he was raised, has spent most of his 73 years becoming intimately familiar with the wood and strings of the guitar. Yet, for all of his voluminous accomplishments and vast influence, Frisell insists he remains a student, not a master.

“It still feels like I’m at the very beginning,” he says. “It’s infinite, what you haven’t gotten to yet. It’s incredible how, if you just sit down with it for a minute, it’s almost immediate — something’s gonna happen you didn’t know was there before.”
In that sense, so are audiences witnessing Frisell perform, stepping into a moment where something did not exist a heartbeat before.

That tension — between absence and presence, between mystery and understanding — hums like an undercurrent beneath every note Frisell has ever conjured, just as it will for those who gather inside Arlington Music Hall to watch Frisell, Morgan and Royston step out onto the proverbial high wire together.

“I feel lucky that there’s an audience,” Frisell says. “I’m hoping the audience — that they’re gonna go with us on this thing. We’re all gonna see what happens. It’s not a show that you go and it’s the same every night or something. It’s an immersive experience, truly, because everyone on stage is finding out what’s happening at the same time as everyone in the audience.

“They really become part of the music too. All that energy, or the sound of the room, what we had to eat that day, or didn’t have to eat, or whatever’s going on, it all gets in there.”

Bill Frisell performs on Thursday, Jan. 23, at the Arlington Music Hall, 224 N. Center St., Arlington. Tickets start at $42.