Q&A: Bill Frisell on "Beautiful Dreamers," Vic Chesnutt and naming instrumentals

Frisell was at home in Seattle, packing CDs during our conversation, which touched on the late Vic Chesnutt, "Moon River" and how instrumentals get song titles.

SoundSpike: Let's start with the basics. How long have you been playing with Eyvind and Rudy, and did they arrive as a pair? Did you write these compositions thinking guitar, viola and drums?

Bill Frisell: I started playing with the guys about two years ago as a trio every once in awhile. Then I wanted to make some sort of an ongoing band. Eyvind and I have been playing with each other for more than 20 years in all kinds of different circumstances. I met Rudy a long time ago, too -- we played together in 1993. He lived in Denver, but didn't want to tour. Finally, he got raring to go and I just had a feeling about the chemical reaction between these people. [Writing for a band] is so much more about personalities than anything else.

Were the songs ready to go when you finally got the trio together?

With this group, we played a lot of music drawn from the library I had. It just worked. At the first gig we just played whatever we knew, and it was all cool. I realized I wanted to make a new record, so I wrote a bunch of new music and in the spring we played all the new stuff at a few gigs.

Was that the point at which you started to think about the instrumentation?

When I write I'm not looking for a song to be a specific sound. I'm looking for people to bring something different to the music each time out so it keeps growing. I can play the same tune with all these different people and it keeps mutating. That's what I'm looking for.

It's an interesting collection of songs that you interpret here -- Stephen Foster's "Beautiful Dreamer" from the 1860s, some Depression-era blues from Blind Willie Johnson, the Carter Family's "Keep on the Sunny Side" -- but you also have three originals dedicated to people. One is "Better Than a Machine" for Vic Chesnutt. What was your connection with him?

Vic Chesnutt was a friend of mine. I played on one or two of his albums and we did a few gigs together -- he was an incredible person. It shook me when he died. I was in Italy in November and December, hanging out and writing music. This is the song I wrote the day I found out he had died.

Who are the other people you dedicate songs to?

Another friend who died, Karle Seydel, I met when I was 13. He was the first guy I knew who owned an electric guitar who let me play. Here's a guy my age who suddenly went away. The other is Cajori. He's just turning 90. He's a painter and was the son of a man who worked with my father at the University of Colorado Medical School. When I was really young he lived in New York and would come home to visit -- a beatnik kind of guy. I was 10. My parents would go off with his parents and he was an adult I related to. The first time I ever saw a Thelonious Monk record it was his. And he'd tell me about going to see Miles [Davis] and Tony Williams. He was a real inspiration to me, but I lost track of him. One day I looked around for him on the Internet and saw that he was teaching in New York and I just thought, on a whim, that I would write a note and drop it off at his office on Eighth Street. I just told him I was playing music. A couple months later I get a letter from him saying he had come to see me play a few times, but he had no idea I was that kid. We reconnected less than 10 years ago and we're still in touch.

You have a knack for choosing great songs to cover whether it's "Have a Little Faith in Me" by John Hiatt, "That's Alright, Mama" on "Disfarmer," Hank Williams tunes, show tunes. I could go on and on. How do you decide what to cover, and why "Beautiful Dreamer?"

I don't know what causes me to choose those songs. "Beautiful Dreamer" is just something that my mother used to sing, I think. I don't know for sure, but it's not random either.

Some you cover with multiple groups like "Moon River." You and Petra Haden did a very cool version and you stretch out on it as an instrumental, too.

"Moon River" is another one of those where I don't know exactly when I first heard it. I probably heard it on a TV show for the first time as a kid, but it's so deep inside me, so way down and embedded. Then seeing "Breakfast at Tiffany's -- there's so much in it that it stirs up a lot of stuff. It's such a beautiful melody and I've had that connection with that goes back to when it was new.

You also have a great version of "Shenandoah." Similar story?

I didn't think about that song much until I did the "Good Dog, Happy Man" album (in 1999). Ry Cooder suggested doing it and he also mentioned the Johnny Smith version (from 1967). He didn't know that I had taken lessons from Johnny in Colorado when I was younger, but didn't know his version. So that came about in a different way. For a lot of people that song has been around forever and I came to it sort of late. When I played it on "Good Dog," it was completely stolen from his version.

"Good Dog, Happy Man" is one of those album titles of yours, like "Blues Dream" or "Nashville" or "This Land," that puts an image in the listener's head. You seem to figure out what the collection of music is saying in an uncanny way. Then there are albums like "Beautiful Dreamers" where its simply the title track. How conscious is the titling effort?

The titles always come at the end. Usually songs are a bunch of numbers -- codes or dates. Once it kind of fits together, then you have to corner it and think of titles. The title can never come before the music -- that would be artificial. Whatever I call something, I hope it's open enough that someone can make up their own story. It's not meant to be fixed.

On "Disfarmer" and a couple of other projects, you had images or titles in front of you already. When you look at the photographs that "Disfarmer" is based on, you feel that rugged rural quality in the same way "Gone, Just Like a Train" has a certain movement and "Ghost Town" evokes a feeling of the Old West.

The general way the stuff comes out, even with "Disfarmer" and using the photographs as inspiration, there's nothing about America or jazz or country in there - - I'm not thinking in those terms. I try to get lost in the music and the direction it takes me. For "Disfarmer" I wrote way more music than I needed so a lot of the process became editing, trying to fit what I'd written. My writing is not a conscious thing. I guess it's the result of growing up in this country, in the West, in the 1950s .

This record is being released by Savoy. Are you finished with Nonesuch and is there a next project on tap?

It could be that I'll do some more stuff for Nonesuch. For the longest time I could just do anything I wanted whenever it came up. It was a dream situation. Everything is cool with them, but they just weren't able to put out this album when I wanted to do it. Savoy came along so I had to move on it. I plan to record my 858 quartet [Hank Roberts on cello, Jenny Scheinman on violin and Kang on viola] in the fall.

You also have some gigs with Greg Leisz called the Jimmy Bryant-Speedy West Project. Those guys (a rockabilly duo) were known for playing super fast, not a style either Greg or you are known for.

We're calling it "Not So Fast." There's no way I could play like that so I don't know what will happen. Greg and I are big fans of them -- steel guitar and Telecaster -- but we'll play that music in slow motion.