Unspeakable by Bill Frisell is great, contemporary, jazz, guitar album. It is incredibly diverse, taking risks in avant-garde minimalism then returning to the ground with warm, funky grooves.
This is the first Bill Frisell album I have ever listened to. I bought tickets to see him at Zellerbach Hall in January, knowing only that he was supposed to be a revered jazz guitarist. Frankly I think I might have had him confused with Bill Laswell. After digging through a stack of his CDs at the Hear Music on 4th Street, I went for the one with a string ensemble, a DJ, and the coolest cover. I listened to the songs over the course of a relatively hectic work week, sequentially and in random play, mostly through headphones in the office and on the bus.
Unspeakable seemed to merge the minimal, loop-like structures of electronic music with the looseness of jam bands. While some of the music had similarities to jam-jazz fusion bands like Mahavishnu Orchestra, John Scofield, Medeski, Martin, and Wood, or even Big Ass Truck, I was struck by this album’s lack of ego. Frequently star musicians jump out in front on songs, with near masturbatory solos and noodling, but Bill Frisell allows his highly technical guitar playing to fit harmoniously inside intricate compositions. Horn stabs and rich strings give many of the songs the orchestral funkiness of a Curtis Mayfield movie soundtrack.
Having been raised on electronic and sample-based music, I tend to put traditional musicians under a lot of scrutiny when they introduce DJs and sound effects. More often than not the results are embarrassingly juxtaposed, sounding like attempts to upgrade old genres to appeal to hip youngsters. This is definitely not the case with Hal Willner’s samples and production on Unspeakable. The samples and effects are layered subtly into all of the compositions to create an almost Baroque richness that reminded me of Future Sound of London’s My Kingdom EP. At one point I took my headphones off to investigate sounds coming from the roof. It turned out to be deeply buried, tiny percussion sounds on the album instead of a rogue squirrel.
I felt that the 13th song entitled “Old Sugar Bear” was a great example of everything that I loved about Unspeakable. The first four minutes of the song are an ambient drone reassembling old Tangerine Dream. A gradual crescendo takes listeners up to through a surreal and dramatic wall of sound that evoked the movie 2001, and then further with blown out Parliament-style funk to close.
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