Bill Frisell owns an abundant and impressive collection of electric guitars — as you’d imagine.

Among them, however, is one that’s particularly close to his heart: a blue Telecaster owned by the late Robert Quine, a close friend.

The two were introduced by jazz drummer and journalist Chip Stern years ago. Early in their relationship Quine — who worked with Lou Reed, Richard Hell & the Voidoids, John Zorn and many others — showed Frisell his Electro-Harmonix 16-Second Delay pedal. Soon after, Frisell made the pedal the centerpiece of his pedalboard throughout the decade and into the ’90s. “It was like it was made for me or something,” he said.

The Telecaster, meanwhile, was presented the last time Frisell visited Quine at his apartment on St. Marks Place in New York City, a couple of years before he passed away in 2004 at age 61 from a fatal heroin overdose.

“We were having a little jam session thing, just messing around, and he was like, ‘Oh, look at this. I just got this Tele, and it’s pretty cool,’” Frisell tells us via Zoom from his home in New York. “It was a Custom Shop model or something like that, kind of an early ’60s copy of a Telecaster.

“So I played it, and it clicked. It was really comfortable and fit the way I was thinking at the time. I think Quine was kind of amazed at how easily I took to it.”

Some time after Quine died, Frisell learned from his friend, the guitarist Marc Ribot, that Quine’s guitars were at Carmine Street Guitars, the West Village shop run by luthier Rick Kelly.

“Marc told me that Rick had all of the guitars, and a bunch of them were for sale,” Frisell explains. “At that point I had never actually met Rick; I’d been in there, but I’d never met him. But he knew of me through Quine, and I went in there and we commiserated about the sad story. It was just so great to connect with him, finally.

“Then I started looking on the wall and was like, ‘Oh, shit, that’s the one I played at Quine’s house the last time I was at his place.’ So I had to get it. I don’t know if that’s morbid or something, but I thought it would be a nice thing to have to remember him. And it’s such a great guitar.”

It’s even greater for Frisell, perhaps, thanks to a few modifications he’s made since acquiring it.

“I ended up changing the neck pickup on it,” he says. “It’s a Ron Ellis, which I really love. To me it’s as close as you can get to the old PAF pickups from ’59 or whenever. I changed the bridge, too, and put on a Mastery bridge. I still have all the old stuff, though, so I could put it back in there if I wanted.”

Frisell did not play the Quine Telecaster on his new album In My Dreams; instead, he used another heavily modified Tele. But the model remains his preferred instrument at this point.

“I have a number of Telecaster-type guitars,” he reports. “When you look at all the music that’s been made on a Telecaster — whatever kind of music, from Led Zeppelin to Barney Kessel — it’s just all over the place. You’ll see a picture of some guy with a Gibson and find out that in the studio he was playing a Telecaster. It’s so versatile. You’re only limited by your imagination.

“And on the practical side, it’s so easy to travel with it. I can carry it on my back and just check it under the plane, and I don’t have to worry. Maybe they’ll break it, but if they do I can just screw it back together. They can take a lot of abuse from the airlines and all that. I can’t do that with an old Gibson Super 400.”

Quine’s influence isn’t limited to Teles, either. He’s also directly responsible for one of the Stratocasters in Frisell’s collection.

“This was in the early ’80s,” Frisell recalls. “I wanted to get a Stratocaster, and Quine took me to Manny’s Music on 48th Street. He knew all the guys who worked there.

“So we went in and got to go into this room where they had all these boxes of new guitars. We went through a bunch of Strats, and Quine picked one out for me. I still have that guitar, too.”

With In My Dreams just out, Frisell will be hitting the road during March for a few concerts with the sextet that made the album, as well as a series of “official” 75th birthday shows, including a special performance on March 22 at the Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Bill Frisell considers himself something of a guitar glutton.

“I’ve got a bad problem. I have way too many guitars,” he says with a smile via Zoom from his New York home, his muscles still sore from shoveling after a recent snowpocalypse.

Still, he concedes, abundance isn’t exactly a curse.

“It’s just about imagination,” says Frisell, who releases his latest album, In My Dreams, today, February 27. His fifth for Blue Note Records, the 12-song set pairs his longtime rhythm section — bass guitarist Thomas Morgan and drummer Rudy Royston — with a trio of string players: violinist Jenny Scheinman, violist Eyvind Kang and cellist Hank Roberts, all collaborators he calls “my closest friends.”

“The guitar is like this magic wand. It’ll take you to these places that you never imagined,” Frisell says. “That’s what guides me, just the instrument itself or music in general. The guitar is, like, the conduit; it brings me into the music. All I have to do is pick it up and my imagination starts getting fired up and it’ll go all over the place.

”It’s the most amazing place to be. It’s where I want to be all the time, more and more these days … to get me out of whatever this horrible quagmire we’re all in.”

While In My Dreams showcases the ensemble, it also features one particularly distinctive instrument from Frisell’s collection.

Recorded live in Brooklyn, New Haven, Connecticut, and Denver — where Frisell and Royston were raised — the album finds him playing the same heavily modified guitar throughout.

“It looks like a normal Telecaster,” he says. “It has a shorter scale, a Gibson scale. The neck pickup is made by T.K. Smith. It’s inspired by the old Paul Bigsby pickups, and he also made an amazing pickguard for it. The bridge is a Mastery bridge; this guy Woody Woodland makes them. The body’s painted by my friend Terry Turrell, and the whole guitar was put together by J.W. Black, who’s an incredible luthier.

“A whole bunch of people put energy into that guitar. It started out about 15 years ago, with the body being painted by Terry, sort of as an experiment to see if the paint would stick — almost like a throwaway thing. But when he got done, it was like, ‘Oh, no, don’t throw this away. It looks too cool.’

”It had a different neck on it. It’s had different pickups on it, a different pickguard. Just about everything on it was something else at one point.”

Frisell, 74, has long favored Telecasters.

“When you look at all the music that’s been made on a Telecaster, whatever kind of music — Led Zeppelin to Barney Kessel — it’s just all over the place,” he says.

This particular electric, though, expands on the template.

“In a way, it’s maybe not a Telecaster ’cause it’s got so many different things,” he says, “but there’s something. They really got it right. Everything you could need is right there. There’s no fancy stuff. It’s just two pickups and volume and tone knobs, and with that you can get an unlimited amount of sounds, as far as your imagination can go, really.”

In My Dreams is another demonstration of the wide-ranging curiosity that has marked Frisell’s career — from his early ’80s work with Paul Motian and John Zorn’s Naked City to a solo discography that began with 1983’s In Line and has spanned a spectrum of ensembles and idioms.

“It’s just a constant state you’re in,” Frisell says. “It can overwhelm you. When I was younger I thought if I practiced a lot I’m gonna get really good and I’m gonna figure out music and everything’s gonna be great and I’m just going to play.

“But it doesn’t work that way. Every time you pick it up, it’ll show you what you don’t know, what you haven’t done.”

Saxophonist Joe Lovano, who played with Frisell in Motian’s trio, calls him “a melodic player, man. He has a sound of his own and an approach from within, and he’s a beautiful, lyrical, melodic player — and one of the early cats who explored different avenues with electronics and loops and all that … to create spontaneous moments in a free-flowing manner. A lot of folks have picked up on that from Bill’s influence.”

For this project, Frisell says he “had this longing to get both those things together in the same place” — his rhythm section and the string trio, who had never previously performed as a combined unit.

“More than the instruments, it’s about the personalities of the people,” he says. “To have all those people together with those instruments, it was a real luxury to be able to write music and arrangements for those people. If I write one little melody line or something more complicated, whatever it is, they’ll find a way to make it all make sense.”

The repertoire blends originals with Duke Ellington’s “Isfahan,” Stephen Foster’s “Hard Times” and the traditional “Home on the Range.” Frisell says his focus was less on spotlighting himself than on fostering conversation.

“I always want to be in the band,” he says. “They put my name on the record, I guess, but I didn’t want to be the guy standing out in front of the band and they’re backing me up. It’s an equal conversation that’s going on with all of us.

“Of course there are things that are going to come to the foreground, but it’s more about this collective thing that gets me most excited … the dialogue that’s going back and forth, talking to each other. It’s not set that, ‘You always have to play this, you always have to play that …’

“What starts to happen is the lines between improvisation and orchestration and arrangement and all that get really blurred. The strings are sort of spontaneously orchestrating things themselves, even when everybody’s looking at the same score. I guess it gets more difficult the more personalities there are, but when everyone is listening and trusting and helping, nothing can really go wrong.

“Maybe,” he adds with a laugh.

Though woven into the ensemble texture, Frisell does step forward at times — notably on “Isfahan,” an Ellington–Billy Strayhorn composition from Ellington’s 1967 album The Far East Suite.

“It really features the trio with bass and drums and me at the beginning,” he says. “It’s a very, very free sort of abstraction of that melody and that harmony … so much about the dialogue with the bass-and-drums trio and more about playing the melody.

“And then the strings on that piece are playing literally what the Duke Ellington arrangement of that song was. That gave me something to just jump off of. As a guitar player I can just push up against it or play with it or on top of it or below it.

“So that’s a place where the ensemble is supporting me in this amazing way, where I’m more the guy who’s flying around and their playing is more controlled than on some of the other ones.”

The title track, he says, better captures the album’s collective ethos. “That’s more where we’re all just playing at the same time and things are sort of shifting. It’s not totally mapped out or figured out, but the harmony is there and somebody’s always playing the melody. We pass it around, and somebody’s always playing some harmony part and it becomes part of this fabric and goes that way for the whole piece.”

After assembling the live recordings, Frisell overdubbed additional parts with producer Lee Townsend and engineer Adam Muñoz at Opus Studios in Berkeley, California, including passages on a well-worn 1961 Gibson J-45.

“I love that guitar,” he says. “Whenever I’m in Berkeley I want to get my hands on that. I think it’s from 1961, and it’s pretty beat — just cracks and stuff. But I just love that guitar so much. It’s on a bunch of my albums.”

As the album arrives, Frisell is preparing a run of performances around his 75th birthday on March 18. On release day he’ll appear in Woodstock with Larry Campbell & Friends and Tony Trischka. Luke Bergman and Tim Angulo will join him for “official” birthday shows on both coasts, including a March 22 stop at the Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa. The In My Dreams sextet reconvenes March 27 in New York, April 2 in Columbus, Ohio, and April 3 in Blacksburg, Virginia.

Frisell shrugs at the milestone.

“I still feel like I’m just at the very beginning,” he says. “Every time you pick it up, what’s in front of you is infinite. It’s not like you finish music; it just goes on and on and on. It’s incredible what music does; when I’m feeling wiped out or, ‘How can I possibly even stand up?,’ when you start playing the music takes over. It really is a miracle.

“I just hope I can keep doing it for a while longer. It feels selfish, but I hope people get something out of it.”

Jazz has admittedly been a tangential interest in my life. My mother passed her love of Dixieland and big band to me, providing me with a decent foundation on which to build my modest knowledge of ensemble jazz.

Later in life I cultivated an affection for be-bop, building a library of albums by Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis and John Coltrane.

I dug fusion, but nothing modern clicked with me until I discovered ECM Records in the mid 1970s, several years after its inception.

The label’s artists and aesthetic meshed well with my interest in meditative and ambient music, and many of the musicians – like Gary Burton and Ralph Towner – crossed over to other artists I had a liking for.

It was in this way I first came to hear Bill Frisell.

I’d find a cut of his here or explore an album of his there, and be blown away by the beauty of it, the consummate virtuosity of his playing and his engrossing use of looping to create constellations of sound that orbit some ethereal atmosphere of his own making.

But if I’m honest, I’ll tell you that it took Elvis Costello for me to appreciate Bill as a musician without borders. I am a huge Costello fan, and when I stumbled upon his and Bill’s live 1995 collaboration, Deep Dead Blue, it made me take notice in a way I hadn’t before.

I was impressed that a musician I so identified with the world of jazz was working with an artist who, as of 1995, was still seen as something of a musical magpie, whose short-lived flirtations included country, Americana and classical string quartet.

Bill’s work with Elvis represented something new. Unlike those other records, Deep Dead Blue featured just two instruments: Elvis’s voice and Bill’s guitar. Hearing Bill’s supportive guitar work – his dynamic combination of restrained phrasing and full chording – and novel voicings gave new life to familiar songs.

It also gave gravitas to Costello, but it blew the doors off my own perceptions of Bill as an artist within the confines of jazz. He’s an artist who knows no boundaries. I don’t think it’s making too much of it to say Bill Frisell has no peer when it comes to his stylistic fluidity, something that has attracted artists from across genres to him.

Bill thinks about and approaches music with an open mind and a sense that every note is a question in an ongoing conversation with his fellow musicians.

Order Elvis Costello and Bill Frisell's Deep Dead Blue here.

One of my standout New York City experiences was sitting right next to the stage at the Village Vanguard, just a few feet away from Bill Frisell, Joe Lovano and Paul Motian while they played their set.

I’d found myself there through serendipitous circumstances. The night before, Bill had come to hear me play at the Living Room. During a break, I heard he might need an amp for his Vanguard gig the next night. I immediately offered my amp to Bill, one of the all-time great guitarists and a super-nice person.

I can’t recall if he ended up using my amp, but either way, he put me on the guest list with a seat at the coveted table next to the band. I could’ve reached out and touched Bill’s guitar.

What I was about to witness was a performance I’ve never forgotten. The players exhibited a telepathic communicative chemistry. It wasn’t jazz; it wasn’t free music. It was simply amazing and beautiful. All the time, their music transcended musical category.

I might say Motian, Lovano and Frisell were the greatest trio I’ve ever heard. All this is evident on Motian’s On Broadway Vol. 1, which features the late drummer with Bill, Joe and the great Charlie Haden on bass.

Released in 1989, On Broadway was recorded the year before, when Frisell’s rig included a Boss Compressor, probably a DeArmond volume pedal and a Boss DD-2 Digital Delay, giving him an almost pedal-steel sound. His lines and chord voicings would majestically flow in and out, creating an ethereal, innovative sound.

Frisell is a musical alchemist. Lovano’s saxophone lines could lead the pack, or follow intuitively while playing reactively to almost every musical statement Motian and Frisell testify. One feels like they are listening to a small community, or a sound collage of a town hall meeting.

Paul Motian was the musical chieftain, playing rhythms that were more like ancient, tribal musical statements. Even when his rhythms are delightfully herky-jerky, they remain poignant, and honest.

Paul Motian was a genius. It would be difficult to name my favorite tracks from On Broadway, since each of the nine is vital and a continuation of a larger picture.

“Liza” has a Lovano-Frisell unison that sounds almost futuristic, going quickly into a classic Motian drum break before Joe and Bill shred creatively.

“Over the Rainbow” is simply a masterpiece, while “They Didn’t Believe Me” is the trio’s midtempo sweet spot, redefining traditional Jazz with personal-sounding harmonic choices.

“What Is This Thing Called Love” sounds cutting-edge modern while feeling introspective. It swings hard, yet lilts drippingly.

Cole Porter’s “My Heart Belongs to Daddy” has a bossa feel with traditional folk music changes that Frisell, Lovano, Haden and Motian bring to an amazing place. It’s a marvel to hear.

“Last Night When We Were Young” is beautiful beyond words, and “I Concentrate on You,” “Someone to Watch Over Me” and “Still in Love” are all equally timeless performances that seem like synchronized parts in a continuing opus.

Sometimes when listening to contemporary jazz with a narrow “rule book,” I feel like a dutiful listener. I appreciate the craftsmanship, but it doesn’t hit my heart. Paul Motian On Broadway Vol. 1 is music that was very easy for me to fall in love with.

After the trio played their set, I tagged along with the group to the Green Room. I thought Paul, Joe and Bill might revisit the set and pick things apart. The only single commentary I heard was from Paul, who looked at Bill and said, “You’re too much!”

On nights like that I feel that everything is all right. Thank you Bill Frisell, Joe Lovano and Paul Motian.

Bill Frisell lives at the crossroads of American music. He’s got a residency covering a variety of hot spots on the musical map with a gang of talented passengers coming along for the ride at the Great American Music Hall over the first weekend in May with a special performance at Grace Cathedral on Friday night, where GP Presents will be on site.

Frisell is one of the great contemporary jazz musicians with over 40 albums to his credit as a leader and a host of sideman credits in an array of genres. Frisell has worked with the likes of Elvis Costello, Paul Simon, James Taylor, Bonnie Raitt, and Robert Plant and Alison Krauss. Frisell’s latest full album, Four (Blue Note), is with pianist Gerald Clayton, saxophonist-clarinetist Greg Tardy and drummer Johnathan Blake. That lineup plays the Great American Music Hall on Thursday, May 4.

GP will be on site the following night, Friday, May 5, at glorious Grace Cathedral for a duo performance with multi-instrumentalist Luke Bergman. He was a member of Frisell’s band for the 2019 release, Harmony, so we expect to hear plenty of material from that gorgeous recording. Songs such as the heavenly “Fifty Years” will surely sound extraordinary. Frisell was a looping pioneer and is a master of ambience, so just imagine what he’ll be able to do with a natural cathedral reverb.

Frisell says: “During the darkest days of the pandemic we found ways to keep going. We helped one another. My friend Luke Bergman and I love to sit around and play our guitars together. We couldn’t do that then. He was in Washington State and I was in Brooklyn. I would send him little bits of music and he’d return them reimagined. Back and forth. He was an angel savior for me during that time. Luke is a master harmonizer, organizer, orchestrator and imaginator. Now we can be back together in the same room again. And what a room, Grace Cathedral!”

Frisell was the focus of GP’s cover feature for the February issue, where he dropped all sorts of wisdom such as: “Every note is a question. It’s like on a micro scale and on a macro scale. If you take your instrument and just hit one note on one string, it’s like, ‘Okay, what are you going to do next?’ But it will lead you to something else somehow.”

Come see where Frisell’s questions lead him in the City by the Bay over the first weekend in May. Get tickets.

WIN TICKETS!

For a chance to win a pair of tickets to see GP Presents Bill Frisell in San Francisco, send an email to gp@jimmyleslie.com with “Frisell” in the subject and simply include a sentence about yourself and why you want to go.

Phone contact greatly appreciated for confirmation.

Winner must provide their own transportation to Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, California on Friday, May 5, and have their own accommodations in the Bay Area.

Best of luck!

EVENT DETAILS

Guitar Player Presents Bill Frisell with Luke Bergman

Friday, May 5

Grace Cathedral
1100 California Street
San Francisco, CA 94108

7pm doors; 8:30pm show

Free GP magazines, Martin strings

GET TICKETS HERE

If you’re like me, you may have thought about your melodic leads and improvisations at one time or another and said, “I’m sick of playing what everyone expects to hear in my solos. Always the same scales, the same arpeggios… I need to take some chances!”

It’s easier said than done, however. So how does one take real melodic chances without sounding like your guitar is falling down a flight of stairs?

The key to achieving this seemingly elusive objective is to use harmonic-melodic substitutions, or superimpositions. This means either performing a line based on an arpeggio that differs from the chord over which you’re playing, or employing a scale that operates outside of a given key.

I touched upon this concept previously in this lesson but offered only a hint of the possibilities. Each example’s superimposed arpeggios stayed within the bounds of the original key.

But there’s nothing keeping you from superimposing arpeggios that venture outside of the given key.

In jazz circles, this approach is referred to as “playing outside the changes,” or “playing out,” for short.

This concept was pioneered back in the 1950s and ’60s by innovative jazz legends John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk and others. Jazz and rock guitarists such as John Scofield, Bill Frisell, Robert Fripp, Frank Zappa, Robben Ford, Julian Lage, Mike Stern, Jim Campilongo and Wayne Krantz have also brilliantly explored this territory in their lead work.

To players unfamiliar with the practice, playing out can be a mystifying concept, seemingly based around the prospect of playing “random” notes that have nothing to do with the original key. But, I assure you, there is nothing random about this approach.

In this lesson, I’ll walk you through some of the mad methods of harmonic-melodic superimposition, with a focus on arpeggio substitutions, first by laying out the simplest approaches and then gradually exploring more complex and harmonically sophisticated methods.

The commentary on the examples will be primarily related to music theory – why we’re playing the notes, as opposed to how they’re played – so be sure to observe all the pick-stroke and fret-hand fingering indications in the notation, which should hopefully provide all the hands-on guidance you’ll need.

Let’s dive in!

BAR-LINE SHIFTING

The simplest approach to superimposition involves what’s called “shifting the bar line.” This means playing over the original chord changes without truly superimposing any new arpeggios over them, but rather extending the arpeggio patterns that match the chords.

This is done by either anticipating the next chord – melodically implying it before the chord change – or prolonging the previous chord’s arpeggio, so that the arpeggio of the previous chord or the next lays over the current chord in the accompaniment.

Ex. 1 presents a melodic line played over a repeating iidim-V-I progression in the key of C (Dm7b5 - G7 - Cmaj7), with each chord falling on the first beat of the bar (on “one”).

Instead of lining up each melodic arpeggio to change on beat one, along with the accompaniment, we’re either extending the arpeggio into the next chord (what’s called suspension) or starting to play the arpeggio of the next chord early, before it appears in the accompaniment (anticipation).

Although we’re not actually introducing anything different here, we’re emphasizing the tensions of each chord, meaning the scale tones that fall between the root, third, fifth and seventh, played an octave higher, which are the ninth, 11th and 13th.

For example, in bar 1 we play a Dm7b5 arpeggio (D F Ab C) over the that same chord.

In bar 2, however, we keep playing that arpeggio, prolonging it as the chord changes to G7 (G B D F) in the accompaniment.

While both chords share the notes D and F as common tones, in bar 2 you’re superimposing the notes Ab and C from Dm7b5 over G7, with those two notes now being heard over a G root note as the b9 and 11, respectively.

This melodic superimposition creates a decidedly jazzier and more dramatic G7b9(11) sound (G B D F Ab C).

As you study the remainder of this example, and all those that follow, notice that each anticipation and prolongation is indicated by a second, lower row of chord names, which identify the arpeggios played, with horizontal lines and brackets showing the extent of their duration.

THE HALF-STEP APPROACH

Here is where we start truly playing “outside,” or “out.”

When we talk about the concept of half-step approaches, we generally think about it in terms of a single tone that sits a half step above or below a chord tone and resolves to it within the course of one beat or less.

Because the resolution happens so quickly, even if the approach tone is out of key, it never truly sounds “out.” Instead, the half-step approach merely emphasizes the chord tone you’re targeting by resolving to it in short order, more like a grace-note articulation of the chord tone rather than a true disruption of the key.

To take our first steps outside of the key, we’re going to apply this approach not only to a single chord tone but to entire sequences of notes. We’ll accomplish this by playing an arpeggio that sits a half step above or below the accompanying chord, taking a chromatic approach but delaying the resolution to the “correct” key.

This allows for more notes outside of the key to sit between chord tones before resolving. By giving these outside tones some melodic structure – in this case an arpeggio instead of a single note – the eventual resolution to the accompanying chord is still perceived by the listener as if you were resolving a single note, albeit with a more interesting and jazzy approach, one that temporarily gives the listener a sense of unease that increases with each outside tone you play before finally resolving.

Ex. 2 demonstrates this melodic device applied to a simple two-chord progression, Am7 to D7, that’s based on the A Dorian mode (A B C D E F# G A).

Over the Am7 chord in bar 1, we superimpose a four-note G# m7 arpeggio (G# B D# F# ) on beat three, which represents a chromatic half-step shift downward from our “one” chord, then resolve it back up to Am on beat four.

Similarly, in bar 3 we superimpose an Eb7 arpeggio (Eb G Bb Db) over the underlying D7 chord (D F# A C), which represents a chromatic half-step shift upward. This move also creates dramatic tension that likewise resolves, or releases, satisfyingly on beat three, as we shift back down to the correct key and play a line built from a D7 arpeggio.

THE TRITONE SUBSTITUTION

Normally, when we think of chord substitutions we think in terms of changing the chord progression itself, or reharmonizing the accompaniment. But the same concept and approach can work effectively without altering the chord accompaniment at all, but rather by implying different changes over it melodically, via different, superimposed arpeggios.

The tritone substitution is among the most common substitutions, which also means it makes for a great superimposition as well.

Any dominant seven chord – a major triad (1 3 5) with a minor, or “flat,” seventh (b7) added – can be replaced by, or superimposed with, a dominant seven chord that sits three whole steps, or a tritone, above or below.

This works because the 3 and b7, commonly referred to in jazz harmony as the guide tones, are common to both chords, with their roles reversed – the 3 becomes the b7, relative to the new root note, and the b7 becomes the 3

Ex. 3 presents an adventurous melodic line played over a straightforward diatonic (scale- or key-based) chord progression in the key of C: Em7 - A7 - Dm7 - G7 - Cmaj7, or iii - VI - ii - V - I. If we were to replace each dominant seven chord with a tritone substitution, it would look like this: Em7 - Eb7 - Dm7 - Db7 - Cmaj7.

Note the chromatic root motion added to this modified chord progression, compared to the original, which moves very angularly in fourths/fifths.

Instead of replacing the chords, however, our example melodically superimposes these tritone substitutions over the existing progression.

The result is a lead that veers forcefully between tension and resolution with each alternating bar, creating a musically compelling feeling of forward motion.

PIVOT TONES

Another musically cool and effective technique for superimposing arpeggios from outside the prevailing key is to take a single note from a given chord and overlay a completely different arpeggio that shares that one note, or common tone, which is often referred to as the pivot-tone substitution.

Played over the same diatonic progression as the previous example, Ex. 4 keeps the tritone superimpositions over the A7 and G7 chords (Eb7 and Db7, respectively) and adds new superimpositions from pivot tones on top of the remaining chords.

Over Em7 (E G B D) in bar 1, we use the note B as our pivot tone and superimpose a B7 arpeggio (B D# F# A).

Conversely, over the Dm7 chord, we’ll superimpose an Fm7b5 arpeggio (F Ab Cb Eb), using the shared F note as our pivot tone.

In both cases, the superimposed melodically implied chords create a significant amount of tension that is only resolved when you finally land on the pivot tone.

Ex. 5 takes this idea even further. Here, over the Am7 - D7 progression found in Ex. 2, we split each bar and superimpose two arpeggios over each chord.

In Bar 1, over Am7, we first superimpose Ebm7b5 (Eb Gb A Db) using the A note as our pivot tone.

Then, on beat three, we switch to an Ab7b9 (Ab C Eb G Bb), with the shared C note serving as our pivot tone.

Moving into bar 2, we superimpose Am7b9# 11 (A C E G Bb D#) over the D7 chord (D F# A C), using both A and C as pivot tones.

On beat four, we switch to an E7 arpeggio (E G# B D) before resolving back to the root of Am to finish.

When exploring this and more advanced superimposing techniques on your own, put your best foot forward by starting your lick either on the pivot tone itself or on a chord tone from the accompanying chord, and then shift into the non-pivot tones of the superimposition.

The purpose of this is to give your melodic line a solid tonal foundation to build on. The tension that comes from playing out will be far more effective if you start from a more balanced sound that an accompanying chord tone will give you.

COLTRANE CHANGES

Tenor and soprano sax legend John Coltrane, one of the most innovative musicians of the 20th century, pioneered the use of multitonic systems in jazz.

’Trane most famously utilized his three-tonic system in his iconic compositions “Giant Steps” and “Countdown.” The chord progressions to these tunes would later come to be widely known as Coltrane changes.

Instead of operating in one key, as one normally would, multitonic systems operate in either three or four equidistant keys at the same time.

In a three-tonic system, the three keys are two whole steps, or a major third, apart from one another, whereas a four-tonic system uses four keys a step and a half, or a minor third, away from one another.

Ex. 6 takes the progression from Examples 3 and 4 and superimposes a three-tonic system over it, as implied by its arpeggio-based melody.

The parent key here is C major (C D E F G A B), while the remaining two tonics of the three-tonic system descending from C are Ab major (Ab Bb C Db Eb F G) and E major (E F# G# A B C# D# ).

After arpeggiating the accompanying chord Em7 (E G B D) in the first half of bar 1 – starting off in the key of C – we then arpeggiate Eb7 (Eb G Bb Db), which is the V7 chord of Ab.

From there we resolve the Eb7 to Abmaj7 (Ab C Eb G) and continue arpeggiating each V7 - Imaj7 cadence of the three tonics, continuing in descending order (Eb7 to Abmaj7, B7 to Emaj7, G7 to Cmaj7) with each implied Imaj7 resolving on the downbeat of the next bar.

On the last two beats of bar 4, we throw in one last Eb7 and B7 arpeggio, which are the V7 chords of the keys of Ab and E major, respectively, before ending on the original tonic chord, Cmaj7.

This creates an incredibly tense lead line that nevertheless resolves back to the original key, C.

With all of the keys being equidistant from one another, they create a sound that may be described as a whole-tone-like tonality – the whole-tone scale being a six-note scale wherein each successive note is a whole step above the previous one – only far more complex. It may take you some time to develop an ear for what works and what doesn’t.

But whether you’re looking simply to dip your toes outside the key or want to embark on your own jazz odyssey (not to be confused with the Spinal Tap song), these tools will act as a perfect roadmap for playing out with perfection.

Just remember, patience is key, and don’t be afraid to take chances when employing these techniques in your own leads. Be adventurous. Besides, what’s the use in sounding like everyone else?

Country icon Dolly Parton has released a brand-new recording of the decades-long favorite “The Last Thing on My Mind.”

Written by American folk singer-songwriter Tom Paxton in the early 1960s, Parton’s original version was released in 1967 as her debut duet single with Porter Wagoner.

Parton also performed the song with the legendary Doc Watson at 2001’s MerleFest. Named in honor of his son, Merle Watson, who died in a tragic farming accident in 1985, multiple Grammy winner Doc Watson hosted the annual music festival prior to his passing in 2012.

"Doc Watson is everyone's hero and a great guitar player,” said Parton. “Some say he is the absolute best, and I was honored to get to work with him a few times in my career.”

Born in Deep Gap, North Carolina on March 3, 1923, Doc Watson would have turned 100 this year. And in honor of his 100th birthday, a new album celebrating the highly influential guitarist, singer and songwriter is set for release on April 28.

In addition to Parton’s “The Last Thing on My Mind,” I Am a Pilgrim: Doc Watson at 100 features contributions from an array of musicians including Rosanne Cash, Steve Earle, Valerie June, Bill Frisell, Marc Ribot, Jerry Douglas, Yasmin Williams, Jeff Parker and many more.

Watson’s enduring legacy reaches far and wide, and I Am a Pilgrim comprises vocal and instrumental tracks performed by a suitably diverse range of artists.

Featuring a host of Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Inductees, Grammy Award winners and recipients of other prestigious accolades, I Am a Pilgrim sees Watson’s work interpreted not only by folk and bluegrass musicians but also by blues, jazz and experimental rock artists.

Track/artist list is as follows:

1. “Shady Grove” by Jerry Douglas
2. “The Last Thing on My Mind” by Dolly Parton
3. “Am I Born to Die” by Nora Brown
4. “Alberta” by Jeff Parker & Matthew Stevens
5. “Make Me a Pallet” by Steve Earle
6. “I Am a Pilgrim” by Rosanne Cash
7. “Florida Blues” by Jack Lawrence
8. “How Long Blues” by Corey Harris
9. “Will the Circle Be Unbroken” by Ariel Posen
10. “Handsome Molly” by Valerie June & Bill Frisell 
11. “Doc's Guitar” by Yasmin Williams
12. “Little Sadie” by Chris Eldridge
13. “Reuben's Train” by Lionel Loueke
14. “The Lost Soul” by Marc Ribot
15. “Your Lone Journey” by Bill Frisell

Pre-order I Am a Pilgrim: Doc Watson at 100 here.

When the Beatles made their American debut on The Ed Sullivan Show on February 9, 1964, it inspired a generation of Boomers to pick up the guitar. But it was a much earlier TV broadcast that helped turn Bill Frisell on to the instrument, when he was a boy growing up in Denver.

Credit Jimmie Dodd, host of The Mickey Mouse Club, with planting the six-string seed in Frisell’s young brain. Dodd was Head Mousketeer during the televised show’s initial 1955 to 1959 run, when it was shown five days a week on ABC stations across the country. He wasn’t just an actor; Dodd also wrote the program’s theme song and premiered his Mousegetar on the November 11, 1955 show, which aired just a few months before Frisell’s fifth birthday.

Dodds’ adeptness on the instrument was immediately evident in the crisp, Django-esque filigrees he played between strummed chords on the tune “I’m a Guitar.”

It may have been that very song that first captured the imagination of young Billy Frisell. “Right there is what got me wanting to play the guitar,” Frisell tells Guitar Player. “I think I was about four. Wow!” 

Frisell’s guitar journey followed a path that began in earnest at age 13, when he took lessons with Bob Marcus at the Denver Folklore Center. In high school, he got hooked on Wes Montgomery and as a senior began studying guitar with Dale Bruning, who recorded a series of jazz standards with Frisell decades later on their 2000 duo album, Reunion.

At Colorado State, now the University of Northern Colorado at Greeley, Frisell studied for one semester with jazz guitar great Johnny Smith, whose clean articulation and impeccable picking technique on 1956’s Moonlight in Vermont, with sax great Stan Getz, had also influenced young Pat Martino.

Smith’s 1962 solo guitar album, The Man with the Blue Guitar, recorded at his Johnny Smith Guitar Center in Colorado Springs, may have served as a template for Frisell’s own 2018 solo guitar debut, Music IS.

To date, Frisell has made more than 40 albums as a leader, starting with 1982’s In Line for Manfred Eicher’s ECM label. Prior to that, he had served as a kind of house guitarist for the imprint, appearing on albums by German bassist Eberhard Weber (1979’s Fluid Rustle), American drummer Paul Motian (1981’s Psalm), Norwegian bassist Arild Anderson (1982’s A Molde Concert) and Norwegian saxophonist Jan Garbarek (1982’s Paths, Prints).

He has since racked up appearances as a sideman on more than 300 recordings that cover a remarkable range of artists and styles. He’s cut pop and rock sessions for the likes of Elvis Costello, Paul Simon, James Taylor, Marianne Faithfull, Rickie Lee Jones, Bonnie Raitt, Joe Jackson, Loudon Wainwright III, and Robert Plant and Alison Krauss.

He’s accompanied jazz legends like pianists McCoy Tyner and Paul Bley; bass players Ron Carter and Gary Peacock; trumpeter Chet Baker; drummers Jack DeJohnette, Billy Hart, Ronald Shannon Jackson and Andrew Cyrille; and saxophonists Charles Lloyd and Lee Konitz.

Some of Frisell’s most potent and revered recordings came as a member of the bass-less trio featuring saxophonist Joe Lovano and led by the late jazz drummer-composer Paul Motian, with whom he made 20 albums during their more than 30 years performing together.

Frisell was also a pioneer of the current craze for looping. He pioneered looping-delay-backward effects in the ’80s, then in the ’90s had some edgy encounters with distortion pedals during his time in the services of John Zorn’s cacophonous avant-noisecore improv band, Naked City.

He’s famously known for using the Electro-Harmonix 16 Second Digital Delay early in his career before switching in 1999 to the Line 6 DL4 Delay Modeler, the looping pedal that has remained in his arsenal ever since.

Frisell has cut back on effects considerably in recent years, allowing his innate musicianship and melodic gifts to shine through with stunning clarity and intention. As ever, what he plays is surprising, rendered with a tasteful, painterly approach.

GP talked to Frisell about his latest Blue Note release, 2022’s Four, with pianist Gerald Clayton, saxophonist-clarinetist Greg Tardy and drummer Johnathan Blake. He also shed light on his philosophy of the instrument, his approach in a band setting and his current arsenal of guitars, which includes a blue Telecaster that belonged to his late friend and colleague Robert Quine, who made his mark with proto-punkers Richard Hell & the Voidoids (their 1977 album, Blank Generation, is a definitive anthem for that era) and during the early ’80s with Lou Reed (circa Blue Mask, Legendary Hearts and Live in Italy).

In Philip Watson’s recent biography on you, Beautiful Dreamer, he brings up your meeting with Robert Quine in the early ’80s at music journalist Chip Stern’s apartment on the Upper West Side. So essentially, we have Chip to thank for bringing you and Quine together, which led to your early experiments with the Electro-Harmonix 16 Second Digital Delay pedal. And the rest is history.

Yeah, Chip was right there when Quine brought it to a jam we had. And as soon as I saw it working, it was sort of this instantaneous thing. I just knew what to do with it. It was like it was made for me or something. And Quine was sort of amazed when I started playing it. His mouth was hanging open just watching me play. I swear, it was like... Somehow it was just all laid out. It just fit with the way my brain was working.

You’ve done so much over time with looping and backward guitar. But on the new album, Four, you only dial up looping on one tune, “Dog on a Roof.”

Well, I thought I was going to make it through the whole record without using that thing. I’ve been using it less and less lately.

Your 2019 album Valentine had some backward effects on it.

Yeah, a little bit. But the last few months of being out there playing, I haven’t used any effects at all. Reverb is about the only effect that I’m using these days.

What pedal do you currently use for looping?

It’s a Line 6 DL4 pedal. I had the Electro-Harmonix 16 Second Digital Delay for quite a while before that bit the dust. Then I had a DigiTech 8 Second Delay, which was also another thing that Quine introduced me to. He always was the first guy to get that new stuff. Then I got the Line 6, and that’s pretty much been it for me for 20 or more years.

But really, I’m sort of getting pretty burned out on effects. The last few months I haven’t been using anything at all. I did a solo gig a couple of months ago, and that’s the kind of situation where I always would rely on it so much. But I was proud of myself: I did the whole gig without using any pedals or anything, just playing by myself. That was sort of the true test, I guess.

It affected the way I hear structures in the music, so you carry that over into how you play without them. So if you take the box away, the effect is still in your imagination. Now it’s almost like I’m trying to get at some of that stuff that I would have done with the delay, but I’m just doing it with my hands.

You’re emulating the effect to the point where it becomes part of your vocabulary.

Yeah, which is kind of great. It’s like you learn something from the machine. It will teach you something that you figure out how to do yourself.

I went back and listened to your first album from 1982, In Line, and that is a startlingly singular statement at that moment. On the title track, for instance, there’s layers of guitars, lots of loops, no discernible time. It’s like a different language for the instrument back then, and it sounds as amazing and refreshing today as it did 40 years ago.

Wow. I haven’t listened to that in so long.

And that debut album introduced a tune that you would continue to play over your career, “Throughout.”

Oh, yeah. I feel like that was sort of the first song that I ever wrote that was like an actual bit of inspiration. It just came out in a couple seconds. I don’t know how that happened and I keep trying to get back to that. Something like that happens and you think, Man, it’s so easy to write a song. But then it’s like, Okay, try to write another one.

On the new album, you reprise your compositions “Good Dog, Happy Man,” “Monroe” and “Lookout for Hope.” What is your attitude about approaching your own tunes that you had previously recorded before?

As I get older, I notice that happening more. For example, I first tried to play “The Days of Wine and Roses” maybe 50 years ago, and as the years go by you keep discovering more and more about the tune. It keeps revealing more and more stuff. So I was aware of that happening with standard tunes.

But what’s weird about getting older, it starts happening with my own tunes. So if I come back to one of my own tunes that I haven’t played in a while, I’ll see it in a completely different way or I’ll notice things that are in it that I didn’t even know were there before. In this case of playing some of my old tunes on Four, it’s really thrilling for me to hear someone else interpret them.

I don’t know if these guys ever even heard those tunes before. I know Greg Tardy played “Monroe” before, but to hear what the other guys’ take on it would be hearing it for the first time, it just brings a whole new life to the song.

With anything I write, I don’t have any hard and fast idea of what it’s supposed to be. I just want it to be a way to get us into playing some music together, and I want to be surprised, and even startled sometimes. So it’s just nice to see what these guys have to say about it.

I’ve noticed that whether it’s you playing a standard or reinterpreting a tune of your own, you do this thing where you’ll leave out fragments of the melody or parts of a chord. Rather than a Joe Pass approach, where you’re putting all of the information in the tune – the basslines, the full chords, the melody – you’re picking and choosing a triad to suggest a chord or part of a line to imply a harmonic shape. It’s kind of a Monkian approach. Jim Hall did that too. Where does that come from for you?

Probably in everything I do there’s going to be some sort of Jim Hall influence in there. But also Monk. I think about Monk every day. He’s like the master of how you can stick with a melody and find infinite variety in that without leaving it, really. And that idea of leaving space: You don’t have to say everything. If the melody is really internalized in you, you begin to hear it the way Monk plays it, where you might just play a piece of the melody and internalize the rest. And it never goes away, but it becomes this springboard for all this other stuff to happen.

The other thing about leaving space in a song is that you want to hear what someone else has to say about it. You know, you can’t just keep pumping it out yourself. You have to leave room for other people to get a word in too. Like with this new album, it’s really more about four people just having a conversation. It’s not like there’s a real soloist anywhere. It’s more about just four people talking.

Four may be one of your least guitaristic albums, in a sense. You don’t even play on “Always,” which is a solo piano piece. And the tune “Claude Utley” is almost a drum showcase for Johnathan Blake. So the album is very conversational, and in some cases you leave the conversation entirely.

Yeah, and that’s the way it would be if you’re sitting around with some people and having a conversation. You know, you’re not talking all the time. You sit there and you check out what somebody else has to say. And then maybe you get your own thing in there at some point.

The dialoguing that you do with Greg Tardy on the Americana piece, “The Pioneers,” reminds me of the intimate duo album you did with him, More Than Enough. Maybe that one got overlooked when it came out in 2019 on the vinyl-only label, Newvelle Records, but it was a fantastic album.

Yeah, that was so great. And it is a little hard to find. Actually, the deal with Newvelle is, the masters revert back to the artist after a few years, so Greg was talking about putting it out as a CD in the near future. So probably more people might get to hear it, eventually.

It has some beautiful examples of you two playing on jazz standards, like Duke Ellington’s “Single Petal of a Rose,” Billy Strayhorn’s “Blood Count” and Thelonious Monk’s “Ask Me Now,” as well as two of your own tunes, “Monica Jane” and “Worried Woman,” the latter which you also recorded on Four.

Yeah, Greg’s been such a great musical partner. I love playing with him. He played on that History, Mystery album that I made a while back [2008]. And we’ve done a lot of gigging together over the years. He’s amazing.

Your very tender “Waltz for Hal Willner” on Four is for the late producer, who you first worked with in 1981 on his Nino Rota tribute record, Amarcord Nino Rota. He subsequently produced several albums that you played on, including Marianne Faithfull’s Strange Weather, the Disney tribute album Stay Awake, Allen Ginsberg’s The Lion for Real, David Sanborn’s Another Hand, the Charles Mingus tribute album Weird Nightmare, Laurie Anderson’s Life on a String and Lucinda Williams’ West, not to mention your own albums that he produced, Unspeakable and The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved.

Yeah, Hal passed so quickly from COVID during the pandemic, within the first month or so. Such a shock there. This piece “Waltz for Hal Willner” is actually an older thing that was part of this Allen Ginsberg tribute project that I did with Hal called Kaddish [which had its world premiere in 2012 at New York City’s Park Avenue Armory and was later performed at UCLA in 2013]. It was an almost nursery rhyme kind of song that appeared in this piece we had done for Ginsberg, and somehow that melody kept coming back to me. And I kept thinking about Hal with that one.

Kaddish was the first time where he specifically said, “I don’t want you to play guitar on it, I just want you to just write the music.” And that was Hal’s way of acknowledging that I could write music. It seemed like everything I did with him would present me with some opportunity, and it was like something that I didn’t even realize that I could do myself.

But Hal would just push me through the door, and I’d have to deal with it. It was always like that with Hal. He knew more of what I was capable of than I did. You know, he trusted me like crazy, from the very first meeting with him in 1980, when no one knew who I was and he asked me to play on that Nino Rota record he produced. He didn’t know me; he just had a feeling about me.

Another song on your new album, “Lookout for Hope,” was the title of your 1987 album. You also recorded it with bassist Kermit Driscoll and drummer Joey Baron on 1991’s LIVE. Then you did it again with Victor Krauss and Jim Keltner on 1998’s Gone, Just Like a Train. It seems like a work in progress.

Yeah, originally the actual form of it was kind of complex. There was something in the form that was kind of odd and sort of awkward, so we didn’t really play it live very much back then. When I did that album with Victor Krauss and Jim Keltner, I completely dispensed with the whole counter line that was going underneath it. So I super simplified it and just opened it wide open, and that just made it easier to just play.

But then later on, I felt like I missed some of what I had originally written. So finally now, 35 years since I wrote that tune, I feel like I finally got it straight the way I wanted. It sort of solidified into this form that we’re playing on this new record. So “Lookout for Hope” was more of this struggle over all this time before I finally felt like I got it right.

It’s like “The Days of Wine and Roses.” You’ve probably played that a hundred different ways on gigs over time.

I hope so. That’s what I’ve tried to do.

You said in an interview with John Schaefer from the 2022 New York Guitar Festival, “Every note I play is like a question.” That’s a really interesting way to think about it. So in essence, you’re doing call-and-response with yourself.

Yeah, I really believe that: Every note is a question. It’s like on a micro scale and on a macro scale. If you take your instrument and just hit one note on one string, it’s like, “Okay, what are you going to do next?” But it will lead you to something else somehow.

And it’s the same thing even with a song: You learn one song and it’ll lead to something else. Like when we were just talking about “The Days of Wine and Roses,” I immediately started thinking about Henry Mancini’s other great tune, “Moon River.” It’s like they keep talking to each other somehow.

You play a phrase or play a little bit of a melody, and it’s like a conversation. Even with yourself, it’s a conversation. You play those first couple of notes on “The Days of Wine and Roses”… that’s a question. And then you answer that question, and it starts snowballing from there.

So the question could be, “The days?” And the answer could either be, “Of wine and roses,” or just, “roses.”

Yeah! Or just a blank response, like, “I don’t know.” Or think of some other completely unrelated response.

That’s what Monk did. He left out a lot of notes playing “Sweet Lorraine” or “Sweet and Lovely” or “Dinah.” When he was playing any standard, especially solo, he really was having a call-and-response with himself.

Definitely. With him, I started noticing how leaving out notes of a chord also is like a huge thing. That happened with Monk. I’m always learning from him. It’s like he’s constantly giving you a lesson or something.

A few years ago, I was playing his tune “Well You Needn’t” and I kept finding all these little details in it that I hadn’t noticed before. I’d find new things. Like I discovered that I was messing up one chord on the bridge. I was playing a Db7th chord, because that’s what everybody plays and all my schooling tells me that. And I thought, Okay, I think I’m finished now; I got everything totally together.

I finally learned this song. But then I found this Blindfold Test with Monk from Downbeat where they played him other people playing his songs. And so that chord in question – I think it was Phineas Newborn playing the song, and Monk goes, “No, no, you can’t play it that way. That chord shouldn’t have a seventh in it.”

So I was thinking it’s C, E, G, Bb, D, but he says it’s gotta be C, E, G, D. And when you leave out that one note, it sounds totally different. And that’s the opposite of what they teach you in Berklee, where it’s this thing about stacking everything up from the bottom to the top, like a pile of books or something. You just keep stacking the notes on top of each other. But if you start taking away some of the notes in the middle, all these other amazing things start happening.

Is it possible to teach a Bill Frisell methodology? Maybe the first lesson is: Leave out notes in the middle of a chord.

Yeah, with a lot of guitar books, it’s about, “How can you make this G major chord something or other sharp this, flat that, and make it into this gigantic six-note chord?” I mean, there’s so much information there. Again, I go back to Jim Hall. He played that way, where you try to pick out a couple notes within that whole rainbow of possibilities, and then it starts to set up a whole other rainbow, just with one or two notes.

Or take Monk: He’s just a master of the idea of you play the root of the chord and one or two other notes that can say so much. And that’s what makes Monk sort of almost possible on the guitar. It’s not like he’s playing all 10-fingered chords on the piano all the time, which kind of wipes out what you can do on the guitar. Instead, he makes it more accessible to where you can actually play what he played.

He played a low A, then he played a C# and a D#, and I can actually do that on the guitar. Part of that comes from just my limitations technically. If I could, maybe I would stick all the Joe Pass stuff in there too. But I can’t really do that, so I just try to make little stabs at it.

We all have to deal with our limitations. For me, I can’t actually physically play everything that I wish I could, so I’m going to just imply it or try to take a stab at something that hits close to home.

I guess the comparison would be Oscar Peterson, where he’s just blazing on the piano on every tune, filling in so much information, and Monk, where he’s leaving so much out that it’s hip. Two entirely different aesthetics on the same instrument, like you and Joe Pass.

I mean, I wish I could do that Joe Pass stuff. I remember one time I heard John McLaughlin in the mid ’70s. Now, I love John McLaughlin. He’s just a huge hero for me, right? But I went and heard him with Shakti, and I almost quit playing. I was like, I give up. It’s too much. I can’t. There’s no way I could ever do this. It was a terrible moment for me.

Then after a while, I was like, Well, fuck it! Whatever it is that I can do, I’ll just try to do it anyway. So I sort of gave up trying to play like John McLaughlin in that moment and I said, Okay, I’m going to just try to do the best I can do with whatever little bit I’ve got. And it sort of got me back playing again.

There’s quite a bit of room there between Jimmie Dodd and John McLaughlin.

[laughs] Yeah! And there are so many ways to express yourself. I mean, Robert Johnson couldn’t play like Segovia. And they’re both about as heavy music as you could possibly imagine.

That’s what’s so incredible about the guitar. When you think about it, Segovia, Robert Johnson, John McLaughlin, Jim Hall, Sonny Sharrock, Johnny Smith, Johnny Winter, Derek Bailey, Wes Montgomery and Jimi Hendrix are all playing the same instrument, tuned the same way. And it’s like, “What?!”

That Quine guitar that you recently played on tour, the blue Telecaster: Did you ever record with it?

The only time I recorded with it was on that McCoy Tyner record [2008’s Guitars]. On that record it was just a straight, normal Telecaster. But since then, I put a humbucking pickup in it. I don’t know if that’s sacrilegious, but I think Quine would be okay with it.

How many different instruments did you play on the new album?

Just two. Mainly, I played my Jay Black Telecaster. I also played a 1966 Telecaster on “Monroe,” but all the other stuff is done with that Jay Black Tele. I got it at the beginning of the pandemic, and it has these Jeff Callahan humbucker pickups in it, so it’s quiet. But they sound more like P-90s. It’s really a good guitar.

You saw Jimi Hendrix in concert, didn’t you?

Yeah! I saw him twice. The first time was in a gymnasium kind of room at a college near where I grew up. The audio of that gig [on February 14, 1968 at Regis College Fieldhouse in Denver] is actually available on YouTube.

It wasn’t the tour he did with the Monkees; it must’ve been his second tour in the States. Soft Machine was opening for him. Are You Experienced had just come out, and I didn’t know what was going on at this concert. It was just so shocking. I don’t even know if they had much of a PA; you’re just hearing the amps coming off the stage, basically. And the whole combination of the way he sang with the guitar and the massiveness of the sound... It was just too much to comprehend, for sure.

Then I saw him again the following year at Red Rocks Amphitheatre in Denver [on September 1, 1968]. I think it might have been the last gig that he did with Mitch Mitchell and Noel Redding, and I remember there was something going on, like he was upset about something during the concert.

By that time, my parents had moved to New Jersey and I was going to school in Greeley. I came to visit them during the Christmas break and ended up going to the Fillmore East to see Blood, Sweat & Tears [on December 28, 1969]. And the amazing thing was, some unknown band from Georgia was opening that night for Blood, Sweat & Tears called the Allman Brothers Band.

This was before they had recorded anything. They came out and were like, “Oh, hi, we’re kind of nervous being in New York for the first time.” It was their Fillmore East debut and they just fuckin’ kicked ass!

This was just a few days before Jimi Hendrix’s Band of Gypsys played the New Year’s Eve concert, which became the famous live album from the Fillmore East. I remember noticing on the Fillmore marquee, it said: “Jimi Hendrix, Dec. 31,” and I’m thinking, Oh, I already saw Jimi Hendrix. I don’t need this. Man, I wish I had gone to that!

You once told me of another eye-opening guitar encounter: seeing Larry Coryell for the first time at Red Rocks.

Yeah, that was another amazing experience. He was playing a Super 400 with a DeArmond pickup, and he was getting it to feedback and everything. At one point during his solo, he walked back to his amp and just sort of rolled the volume knob on the amp with his forearm. It was so loud and wild!

Hearing Coryell and having heard Jimi Hendrix just a few months before that too… Talk about having your brain explode!

Order Four by Bill Frisell here.

Back in the late ‘60s, our latest cover star – Bill Frisell – had the enviable experience of witnessing Jimi Hendrix in his prime.

In this interview extract from our most recent issue, Frisell recollects being overwhelmed by the high priest of psychedelic rock when attending a live show at a sports hall in Denver in 1968.

Having watched Hendrix perform for a second time at the Red Rocks Amphitheatre, he later passed up the opportunity to catch the guitarist’s Band of Gypsys New Year’s performances at the Fillmore East – a regret mitigated only by seeing the Allman Brothers Band’s debut at the legendary venue.

“I saw [Jimi Hendrix] twice. The first time was in a gymnasium kind of room at a college near where I grew up. The audio of that gig [on February 14, 1968 at Regis College Fieldhouse in Denver] is actually available on YouTube.

“It wasn’t the tour he did with the Monkees; it must’ve been his second tour in the States. Soft Machine was opening for him. Are You Experienced had just come out, and I didn’t know what was going on at this concert.

“It was just so shocking. I don’t even know if they had much of a PA; you’re just hearing the amps coming off the stage, basically. And the whole combination of the way he sang with the guitar and the massiveness of the sound... It was just too much to comprehend, for sure.

“Then I saw him again at Red Rocks Amphitheatre in Denver [on September 1, 1968]. I think it might have been the last gig that he did with Mitch Mitchell and Noel Redding, and I remember there was something going on, like he was upset about something during the concert.

“By that time, my parents had moved to New Jersey and I was going to school in Greeley. I came to visit them during the Christmas break and ended up going to the Fillmore East to see Blood, Sweat & Tears [on December 28, 1969].

“And the amazing thing was, some unknown band from Georgia was opening that night for Blood, Sweat & Tears called the Allman Brothers Band. This was before they had recorded anything. They came out and were like, ‘Oh, hi, we’re kind of nervous being in New York for the first time.’

“It was their Fillmore East debut and they just fuckin’ kicked ass! This was just a few days before Jimi Hendrix’s Band of Gypsys played the New Year’s Eve concert, which became the famous live album from the Fillmore East.

“I remember noticing on the Fillmore marquee, it said: “Jimi Hendrix, Dec. 31,” and I’m thinking, Oh, I already saw Jimi Hendrix. I don’t need this.

“Man, I wish I had gone to that!”

Through the course of five evocative ECM albums, Danish guitarist Jakob Bro has forged a distinctive musical identity with a deft fingerstyle approach to his instrument, along with a penchant for delicate lyricism and intuitive flights that often take him into the unknown.

Making subtle use of looping technology, backward effects and the occasional onslaught of distortion has allowed him to go from soothing introspection to translucent soundscapes to angular skronking, sometimes within the same piece.

The 44-year-old sonic explorer made his ECM debut on drummer Paul Motian’s 2006 album Garden of Eden, which featured the three guitars of Ben Monder, Steve Cardenas and Bro blending brilliantly in the mix.

He appeared three years later on Polish trumpeter Tomasz Stanko’s darkly introspective 2009 outing on ECM, Dark Eyes, then debuted as a leader on ECM in 2015 with Gefion, featuring bassist Thomas Morgan, a frequent collaborator of Bill Frisell’s, and veteran Norwegian drummer Jon Christensen, a member of Keith Jarrett’s celebrated European Quartet of the 1970s.

“It was really a big step when I went from doing my own records on my own label [Loveland Records] to recording for Manfred Eicher on ECM,” Bro says. “I wasn’t even sure I wanted to present a guitar trio on my first album with him, but he really helped me by stepping up and saying, ‘You have a voice on the instrument.’”

Bro followed with three intimate offerings on ECM – 2016’s Streams, 2018’s Returnings and 2018’s live trio recording, Bay of Rainbows – all showcasing the guitarist’s warm, inviting tone, tastefully fluid improvisations and engaging melodicism, mixed with a decidedly mysterioso quality.

2021’s Uma Elmo was recorded during the pandemic in two days at a Lugano, Switzerland studio, with an international crew of Norwegian trumpeter Arve Henriksen, Spanish drummer Jorge Rossy, producer Eicher and Italian engineer Stefano Amerio.

Named for his two small children, three-year-old Dagny Uma and seven-month old Osvald Elmo, Uma Elmo is a remarkably expressive and highly personal statement by the accomplished guitarist and features tributes to two of his late mentors: the legendary alto saxophonist Lee Konitz (“Music for Black Pigeons”) and Stanko (the minor-key lament “To Stanko”).

Bro’s dreamy, translucent and eminently open music is the result of him trying to capture moods through his guitar and textural looping techniques, done in real time rather than overdubbed. As he explained, “My compositions are about catching a glimpse of a feeling, sketching it down and then unfolding these sketches and letting them take you places you haven’t been before.”

The rising star has a pair of new albums on ECM. Once Around the Room: A Tribute to Paul Motian is an all-star homage to the late drummer-composer and Bro’s former beloved employer. It’s a septet outing co-led by tenor sax great Joe Lovano and featuring double bassists Larry Grenadier and Thomas Morgan, guitarist-bassist Anders Christensen, and drummers Rossy and Joey Baron.

Bro is also releasing Live at the Village Vanguard with his own quartet, which includes drummer Andrew Cyrille, tenor saxophonist Mark Turner and bassist Morgan.

In addition, Bro and his music were the subject of Music for Black Pigeons, a 90-minute documentary by filmmakers Jørgen Leth and Andreas Koefoed that premiered at the Venice Film Festival in September 2022.

It features interviews and performance footage with several of his colleagues, including Lovano, Motian, Stanko, Morgan, Grenadier, Frisell, Konitz, Eicher, Jon Christensen, Midori Takada, Palle Mikkelborg and Cyrille Turner.

The guitarist conducted this Skype interview from his home in Copenhagen...

How did you cope during the pandemic? Did you do any remote teaching or live streaming concerts?

No, nothing. I was playing with my band at the Village Vanguard in New York in February [2020], and then things shut down. I had maybe 80, 90 concerts canceled after that. The only thing that didn’t get canceled was this album on ECM [Uma Elmo].

And for a while it just seemed like it was not going to happen because we were in the midst of a global pandemic and everyone was in lockdown in a different country. But there was a gap of two weeks where things actually were possible, and so we made that record.

I wrote all the music during the pandemic. Instead of going on the road, I had time at home to write and be with my wife and children. And then the cancellations just kept coming. So, basically, I had all the time in the world to work on the music for this record.

I composed most of the material for the recording in between Osvald’s naps when he was a newborn.

I remember seeing you at the Vanguard in 2004 or so with Paul Motian’s Electric Bebop Band, just before you recorded Garden of Eden. I didn’t know who you were at the time, and my first thought was, Three guitars? Is Paul crazy?

Yeah, he was crazy, and that was my good luck. I did a three-week European tour with him in 2003, and at some point after that he decided that he didn’t want to travel anymore; he wanted to just play in New York. And he invited me over for that week at the Vanguard.

When Paul invited me into his group, I was really young. To me, it was the same as if Johann Sebastian Bach would have reached out to me. He’s that big for me. And I learned a lot from just hanging out with him.

I think one of the main things that I got from Paul is an appreciation for the sort of mystery about music. Why is some music really affecting me? Why is some music moving me? Why is something stronger to me than other things? That’s a mystery somehow to me still.

And playing with Paul, playing with Tomasz Stanko or Lee Konitz, all of the older generation musicians put an emphasis on the fact that music is still a mystery. Lee will pick up the horn and play one note and I get goosebumps. The same with Paul when he hits a cymbal or Tomasz when he plays a single note on the trumpet.

All those people have reached a point with their music where it went further than just being the instrument. It’s almost like it’s their life coming out of the sound they create, which is fascinating to me, and also inspiring. And it triggers me in a way, because I don’t know how to do that. It’s something completely abstract to me.

But just being surrounded by that thing, it’s really strong. That’s probably the most valuable thing for me, in terms of having played with musicians from the older generation. Having Paul Motian wash you with his cymbal every night at the Village Vanguard for four weeks total is an experience that is so valuable to me that it will always be a part of me somehow.

And I like to think that it’s also something that will come out in my music, in some way.

You went to the Berklee College of Music in Boston, where I imagine you encountered a lot of bebop and standard jazz repertoire while transcribing tons of solos. And it seems like you’ve evolved away from all that in your own music.

Yeah, before Berklee I went to the Royal Danish Academy of Music in Copenhagen when I was 17 years old. I was there for one year, and during that year we had a seminar with [saxophonist] Michael Brecker, [pianist] Danilo Pérez, John Abercrombie and [bassist] Eddie Gómez.

That seminar was kind of a turning point for me. Michael Brecker and Danilo and Abercrombie came up to me after the student concert; they sort of cornered me, and I was completely freaked out. And they were like, “You have to come to the U.S. to study.” So that was my reason for quitting the Royal Academy of Music in Denmark.

That same summer I met Kurt Rosenwinkel here in Denmark. I was playing a concert with a trio, and we were playing a John Coltrane song called “26-2,” and all of a sudden this guy comes up and asks if he can play a solo in the middle of the song. And I was like, What the fuck!

But I give him my guitar and he plays a great solo, then gives me the guitar back and we finish the set. And I go up to him afterward and he says, “Thank you for the music. My name is Kurt Rosenwinkel. If you ever come to the U.S., look me up. I want to hang out with you.”

So those two incidents that summer sort of made me want to quit my studies in Denmark and go to the states to study at Berklee. I was there for six months, not doing much, just practicing all the time. It wasn’t until I came to New York a year later that I really started getting into being fascinated by standard material by listening to Kurt Rosenwinkel, Brad Mehldau’s trio and, of course, Paul Motian’s band.

How were you able to find your own voice on the instrument?

I think the real turning point was being in Paul Motian’s Electric Bebop Band. Being surrounded by all these great musicians – Tony Malaby, Steve Cardenas, Jerome Harris, Chris Cheek, of course Paul himself – was so inspiring.

And then playing Paul’s original material night after night had such a strong and deep impact on me that I just started composing at that time. That’s when I feel like I started making sense as a composer. And I can see now that the first things I was writing after joining Paul’s band were very similar to Paul’s way of using breaks for the drums and using his arrangements.

Then, somehow, I feel like I found a way that was sort of more in line with where I come from. I’m not from the U.S.; I’m not from New York. I’m from a tiny place near the beach in Denmark [Risskov]. And I feel like, slowly, my compositions started reflecting some of that as well. So it’s been a journey for me, having my sound as an instrumentalist develop, having my compositions develop, finding how much improvisation do you want, how much composed material do you need to make this music come alive somehow.

And Paul Motian was a really big inspiration for all of that coming together.

Isn’t the very atmospheric opening track on Uma Elmo, “Reconstructing a Dream,” one that you played in Paul Motian’s band?

We played it on gigs and we recorded it, though it never came out. And “Slaraffenland,” which is on the album too, is another we played with the Electric Bebop Band. Paul would use it as an encore here and there when we were playing in Europe.

And for me, it was like a dream come true to hear him play my music. He was so kind to me and really supportive in that way.

When you speak of Motian and the influence that he had on you, that necessarily brings to mind Bill Frisell, who played with him so frequently in Motian’s trio with saxophonist Joe Lovano. Was Bill’s approach to the guitar a direct influence on you?

I love Bill. I’ve always loved him, mostly with Paul Motian. For me, that’s some of the greatest music of all time. I can stay with Paul Motian’s On Broadway volumes I and II for my whole life, basically. That’s enough info right there.

When I started out playing guitar – I actually started out on trumpet before I switched to guitar – I was listening to Bill, Pat Metheny, John Scofield, John Abercrombie, Mike Stern, Ralph Towner, Jim Hall, Pat Martino. Those were my main influences in terms of jazz guitar.

But after a year or so I started regretting that I stopped playing the trumpet, because the music I was really loving at that time when I was learning jazz was Miles, Coltrane, Monk, Billie Holiday, Bill Evans. I was fascinated with the older generation and the more acoustic-sounding music. I was so fascinated by Sonny Rollins for a long time, and I was also transcribing all of Lester Young’s solos.

The trumpet players for me have always been Miles, Stanko, Tom Harrell. And my all-time favorite is Louis Armstrong. My dad’s hero was Louis Armstrong, so that was playing every day at home when I was growing up.

And I’ve gone through phases where I wished I played the trumpet or saxophone, because the guitar was hard for me somehow. It has been a struggle to find a way where the guitar would not be in the way of what I was hearing. That took me a long time, actually. Now I see the guitar as an essence. And while I have many heroes on guitar, I’ve never transcribed a Bill Frisell solo or a Pat Metheny solo.

That said, it’s incredible to hear Bill with Paul, especially the way he accompanies, like on On Broadway volumes I and II. It reminds me of the way Thelonious Monk accompanies, where they can create a whole world. You don’t even think of what chord Bill’s making; it’s just like a sound, basically.

Jim Hall could do the same thing. For me, those two are probably the most fantastic guitar players in terms of accompanying other musicians. I was listening today to the Paul Motian Trio’s It Should’ve Happened a Long Time Ago, and the way Bill is comping and the whole universe of sound he gets… I still have no idea how he’s doing it, but it’s completely fascinating to me.

Also, when you hear him in the different stages of his career, you can hear the whole history of guitar effects in Bill’s playing. And the way he’s using them is always so musical.

Frisell pioneered the creative use of looping devices, which is something you utilize in subtle ways throughout Uma Elmo.

Yeah, and it’s funny, because he’s still using that old green Line 6 looping pedal [the DL4 Delay Modeler], which is, like, ancient now in terms of what has been produced since then. But it’s perfect for him, and he can do magical stuff with it. And it’s so different from what I’m doing, not because I don’t want to do it, but simply because I have no idea how he’s doing it.

But definitely, the whole thing about adding layers and textures to the music, and having things underneath, that’s been a thing that I’ve been inspired by and that I’ve wanted to do for a long time.

And, of course, Frisell is the grand master of all that. So I’m always inspired by Bill, but I’m also inspired by electronic music. I’ve been listening to Aphex Twin a lot lately. So the inspiration is coming from various sources.

What kind of looping pedals do you have?

It’s by an American company called Chase Bliss. I have their Tonal Recall and Blooper pedals and also an analog Red Panda Particle Granular Delay V2, which is a pedal that has a life of its own. My other effects pedals are a Zvex Ringtone sequenced ring modulator, a Gamechanger Audio Plus sustain pedal, and an Eventide H9 harmonizer, which is like a Swiss Army knife of effects. It has thousands of things you can do, but I have narrowed it down to 10 or 12 sounds that I like to use. I also have a Klon Centaur Overdrive and a Neunaber Immerse Reverberator.

My fascination with effects started when I was playing with Tomasz Stanko’s quintet. That setup was so traditional – drums, bass, piano and trumpet – and I thought the guitar was like an alien in that setting. But Stanko was encouraging me always to find my own spot in that music, so I started experimenting with effects pedals.

A clean sound was cool in some settings – when playing a ballad or something – but sometimes the energy of the band was really high and I needed something where I could just step right in there and do something with my instrument, where everybody wouldn’t have to lower their energy. And for that reason, I just started experimenting with effects.

I had a Tube Screamer, an old Boss looper, a Zvex Ringtone modulator, a reverb pedal, a delay pedal. And Stanko really just encouraged me to go off. So during my time in his band, I really went in different places. Sometimes I was afraid that it was too much, but he was always super cool about that, actually.

You are part of a lineage of guitarists trying to sound like saxophone players in their long legato lines.

Yes, there was a time when I wished I could play like Coltrane or Miles, Sonny Rollins, Lester Young. But one thing I’ve realized in my journey is that it’s not going to happen with this instrument. The way Coltrane is playing on the saxophone, the way George Garzone or Joe Lovano is playing on the saxophone – I’ve tried to convert that to my guitar, transcribing hundreds of solos, but I’ve never found a way to play like that on the instrument and make it fit into my overall vision of the music.

And I realized at some point that this instrument is doing other things. So I have to take the sort of expression from the people I love – the vibe, the atmosphere, the whole emotional part of it – and see if I can learn how to make that come out of my guitar. And that’s something that has changed my attitude.

There was a time when I started hating the guitar because I was frustrated with not being able to play those long saxophone lines. Now I sort of love it for this reason. Because I’m thinking that if I played the saxophone, it would have been much harder for me to have found a path of my own.

There would have been so many heroes of mine that I wanted to sort of follow, and that’s not really the case with the guitar. It’s more of a musical thing for me.

I understand you have a new guitar?

Yes, I have a pink Nash Telecaster. It’s made by a luthier named Bill Nash, who Bill Frisell introduced me to about six years ago. It’s not a fancy instrument, but it’s really well-made. I got rid of all my old guitars for touring. I don’t want to deal with stress at the airports and stuff like that. This is my guitar now. I only have one.

Are you playing with fingers throughout Uma Elmo? Or are there some songs or passages where you are using a pick?

I used to play with a pick, and I was practicing like hell with a pick. And then two, three years ago, I just threw it out. I kept seeing myself putting the pick in weird places, and then it was sort of in the way. I just felt like using a pick was one step removed from my fingers touching the instrument. And now playing with fingers gives me a different sort of freedom, though I’m definitely limited now.

I mean, in terms of playing lines, I can’t play what I could with the pick. Like, if I transcribed Coltrane’s solo on “Countdown,” for instance, I wouldn’t be able to play that with my fingers right now. I could do it with a pick, but not with my fingers.

But in terms of my own music, I’ve always felt like I could do the things I heard with just my fingers.

Definitely. I remember recording that first record I did for ECM with Jon Christensen and Thomas Morgan. Listening back in the control room with Manfred Eicher, I remember thinking that I sounded too much like Frisell here or Pat Metheny there or John Abercrombie at times.

Would you say you have evolved in your playing since Gefion, your debut album in 2015?

And at some point during the recording I just felt like I couldn’t play anything, because all those guys were in the room. I think I went almost a year where I couldn’t listen to the album because I was so ashamed of it. I was like, “I can’t put it out. I’m bending a note at one place where you can clearly hear that’s a Metheny thing or that’s a Frisell thing.”

And I was giving myself such a hard time about it, really. Now, I love those players. Frisell is an incredible human being, and he’s an incredible musician. The same with Pat Metheny. The way he’s playing the acoustic guitar on “Lonely Woman” from his Rejoicing album is just incredible.

But it’s just music to me. I’ve never really listened to something and said, “Wow, that’s just virtuoso. I wish I could do that.” I’ve always listened to the soul and the music around it. So I’m not really so impressed by the guitar playing; I’m more interested in hearing people talking to each other on their instruments. That’s when the music, for me, is happening.

Bill Frisell has played with musical artists across the gamut of styles.

But whether he’s jamming with John Zorn, recording with drummer Matt Chamberlain in the group Floratone, or performing with Elvis Costello (as he did for 1995’s Deep Dead Blue), he approaches the music with the idea of listening and understanding.

Here, the guitar master tells us about his chameleon-like ability to blend with other players and connect with the music while letting his unique voice shine through...

How do you get the dexterity to jump from one style to the next?

You know, this whole thing with styles and genres and all the labels we put on all these things... We need to talk about it, so we have to have words for it. But when I’m playing or listening or whatever, I’m not thinking, This is jazz, or This is rock, or This is Americana...

I don’t really change what I do from situation to situation. Just listening is the main thing. And then just trying to understand as deeply as I can what’s going on around me and reacting to it.

The context may change, but my process is the same. It’s just about being open to certain things.

And what do you think attracts so many different artists in different genres to you?

I think it’s the same thing: I appreciate and listen to what they’re doing. All you have to do, if you like something, is be open to it. I’ve been lucky to be able to tell people I like their music, and then they’ll usually welcome me into their world.

What can others do to develop that fluidity?

It’s about being straightforward about what you like, and being humble about it too. If there’s someone you want to play with, go to them and try to learn from them. That’s how my own bands work.

It’s like, the guys in my band are blowing my mind so much that I’m really not the leader of the band. I have them in my band because I want to figure out what they’re doing. I heard Ry Cooder say that a long time ago: that you learn from your band. If you go in there with that attitude, then you’ll be welcomed.

Most people are generous and want to share what they know. But if you go in there saying, “Oh, I’m going to be a super bad ass, I’m gonna show this guy,” that puts someone off. So, humility is the key.

And if I do a workshop with younger players, I always tell them to not be afraid to show what it is that you actually like. The worst thing is to try to be cool, or to try to do what you think somebody else thinks is cool.

So you’ve got to be strong. And if you happen to like a Burt Bacharach song or whatever, then just play it. That’s what gives each person their own individual voice. Again, it’s just that openness to all music. There’s so much amazing music and I keep trying to figure out what’s going on with it.

Order a copy of Philip Watson's Bill Frisell, Beautiful Dreamer: The Guitarist Who Changed the Sound of American Music here.

Bill Frisell is a giant among giants of the jazz guitar world. A contemporary of such legends as Johnny Smith (from whom he received lessons) and Pat Metheny (who gave him his first major break) he has spent a lifetime in music honing his craft.

Along the way, you could say he’s picked up a thing or two. And while he acknowledges that learning and practice are essential, he also emphasizes that there is a lot more to being a musician than many people think.

Referred to as “The Guitarist Who Changed the Sound of American Music” in the title of his new biography, Guitar Player caught up with Frisell to talk about the finer points of musicianship. 

Here are ten of his best tips…

1. Listen

Listening is the number one thing – taking your attention away from yourself. 

In one way it was good to get back to practicing and being in my own head during the Covid lockdown. But when you’re playing with a band, that’s not what you’re supposed to be doing.

You need to have your attention away from yourself. I don’t want to be thinking about what I’m doing. I want to be as focused as I can be on the people around me.

It helps me so much to just look at the other people in the band. It sort of opens everything up. It’s such a simple thing but it really helps the music for me.

Listening is such a huge thing. It sounds simple, but it’s a lifelong struggle to really, really listen.

2. Don’t Judge Yourself

What we perceive we’re doing when we play often has hardly anything to do with what’s coming out the front. 

At the time you might think, This is the most badass shit I've ever played in my life! And then you listen to a recording and go, "What was I thinking?" 

Or, you could be having some crisis in your head like, I just can’t play anything! But when you listen back it’s beautifully formed.

All that stuff in your head – you have to shut it down. The idea is to get rid of all that and just be immersed in the music. 

Try not to attach yourself to whatever just happened. You have to be constantly shedding off the idea it was good or bad.

3. Be Present

If you have a really great night, like you’re all high off the gig, you can’t think, That was so great – let’s do that again at the next gig. 

The reason it was great is because you were all in the moment and you were responding to whatever was going on around you.

You just have to be as present as you can at all times. It’s the most amazing thing when the whole band is in the moment. It’s like you’re not thinking.

Gigs can be completely different to what you expect, no matter what you do before to prepare. 

You get there and there’s like a loud refrigerator motor going over here and a bunch of people yelling over there or whatever – just nothing like what you had been planning for.

But you can’t hold on to what you hoped it would be. It’s about acceptance and letting go. You just have to be there, present.

4. Embrace Mistakes

Mistakes are awesome. If you don’t freak out. 

Like if you’re going for something and you mess it up, maybe the tendency is to think, Oh shit! I fucked it up! But again, it’s about listening. 

If you listen to what it is, if you’re in the moment, it could be better than what you were trying to play.

If you make a mistake, what you play after it can make it sound right. If everyone in the band is in the zone – listening and trusting each other – it’s like you’re rescuing each other all the time.

It’s not supposed to be a contest. I’m really not into the whole ‘I’m right and you’re wrong’ thing. I mean, let’s try to make something cool with what just happened.

5. Practice is Great (Up to a Point)

I used to think that if you practiced real hard you get to this place where everything is just great all the time. But it’s just not so. The joy is being in the process. 

Anyone that says they’ve got it completely together is lying.

I’ve seen that mess with people. You can’t think, I’m going to practice and get to this certain point and then I’m going to do something. Because you’ll never get there. 

You just have to go for it right now and do the best you can, and just keep on pushing ahead.

You can’t wait until you’ve finished something before you get to the music.

6. Don’t Think for Others

You’re the only one who truly knows how successful you are. 

If you’re worried about what somebody else is going to think it’s just another thing that gets in the way of doing it. Because you’re never going to know what the audience is hearing.

For me, the most honest way to perform is to think, I love this and I’m going to do it as best I can. 

If I’m feeling some kind of joy in what I’m doing, then hopefully the audience is going to hear that and get off on it. And if they don’t hear it, well there’s nothing I can do about that.

I’m lucky. I’ve had people listen to me play. But if I was just trying to figure out what they wanted to hear I’d be chasing around forever.

7. Be Yourself

I definitely spent time early on trying to be cool. Like maybe there would be a song I liked but I thought it was kind of corny, so I didn’t want people to know I really liked it. I wanted people to think I was this super hip blues guy or something.

But as time went by, I realized I had to be honest about who I am and where I came from. 

I can’t take on the persona of someone else. I wasn’t a jazz guy that grew up in the ‘30s and ‘40s; I grew up in Denver in the ‘50s and ‘60s. That’s my experience.

Being honest with your own experience is going to make things way stronger. Don’t be afraid to show who you are and where you come from. 

Sometimes it’s scary to put yourself out there, but try to overcome that and don’t be afraid to be you.

8. Destroy Competition

This whole idea that music is about competition – as if someone is better than someone else, or this instrument is harder than that one, like what are you talking about?! 

I mean it doesn’t make sense. I love what John Andrew Rice, one of the founders of Black Mountain College, said:

“There are things learned through observation that cannot be learned any other way. Whatever cannot be expressed in words cannot be learned through words... 

"The worthwhile struggle is the interior one, not against one’s fellows but against one’s ignorance and clumsiness.”

Instead of trying to keep score we should just be helping each other. We know how successful we are with trying to do what we’re trying to do. And that’s enough to worry about. We don’t have to be putting that on somebody else.

John Andrew Rice thought there shouldn’t be a winner and a loser in a debate – he believed it was about finding the truth, as opposed to being a contest. 

That’s how I feel about music. Let’s try to get together and make something good. It’s not a competition.

9. Take Chances

The music gets way higher when everyone in a band feels safe that they can take a chance. It’s a lot better to just go for it than be thinking, I better not try that because I might mess it up.

It might be good or bad, but that’s how you learn. It’s the only way to move ahead.

Skill is great, but there has to be some sort of story behind it. All this technical stuff is nothing if you’re not saying anything with it.

It’s about showing who you are – that’s all you can do, I guess. And that’s often not about what you learned in a book.

10. Learn to Forget

I know we need to practice our instruments, but you need to be able to shake that off when you’re really trying to play the music. 

I’m in a privileged position because I have a lot of gigs, but if I practice all day and have all that stuff in my head later on at the gig it can be detrimental.

Sometimes, you’ll find there’s stuff you can do in practice that you can’t seem to bring into another scenario. You want to take it with you all the time, but it just doesn’t work that way. 

When you’re on stage you’re not in your own living room, y’know?

We have to practice and learn things. If I’m learning a song, I want to get the song so deep down inside me that I’m not thinking about mathematics or numbers – that place where it becomes automatic. Like if you’re riding a bike, you’re making a million calculations but you’re not thinking about it.

Sonny Rollins (one of my biggest heroes) said that music is happening too fast to be thinking about it while you’re playing. 

That totally makes sense to me.

Order Bill Frisell, Beautiful Dreamer: The Guitarist Who Changed the Sound of American Music by Philip Watson here.

Keep an eye on Frisell’s upcoming shows here.

***The following interview excerpt originally appeared in the July 1992 issue of Guitar Player***

World renowned for his work with Miles Davis's early-'80s ensembles, John Scofield remains at the top echelon of jazz guitar players, performing with Joe Lovano and dishing out superb records like Time on My Hands and 1991's Meant to Be. 

In fact, Sco may be the king of post-rock bebop electric guitar. Originally inspired by the early-'60s British rock invasion, he dove into the improvised linear waterfalls of John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk and Charlie Parker, surfacing with a uniquely lyrical single-note integrity and a wicked knack for "that swing."

The perfect counterpoint to that linearity is Bill Frisell, whose credits only begin with John Zorn's Naked City, Paul Motian, Vernon Reid and Paul Bley. Frisell created what even John Scofield calls "the most unique concept in guitar today."

Seemingly oblivious (or wisely wary) of categories, Frisell draws naturally on his entire consciousness of music and sound. Intelligent, warm and imaginative, his earlier ECM outings and recent Elektra/Nonesuch records with the Bill Frisell Band – Is That You?, Before We Were Born, and Where in the World? – reveal a complex and deeply human musical personality.

The title "colorist" is far too limited – his music conjures the many unseen sides of melody and emotion, and does so with the depth and purity of a mature musician.

Right now Bill's system is fighting impurities in the form of a nagging cold, and Sco has just shaken off bronchitis. But when the music begins, the real world fades as line artist and painter, structuralist and texture man, merge in the harmonic pool of the rehearsal room.

Here, all labels are unreadable; as Sco eases in fat chords with a twist of his volume knob, Frisell roars into mazelike fuzz lines that spin out into muted purrs.

A few days later, with Grace Under Pressure in the can, the two musicians relax together over coffee on a small hotel room couch. Their personalities speak volumes about their sounds. 

Looking you dead in the eye, Scofield is animated and articulate, the educated product of an East Coast background.

Surveying the room, Frisell is shy in an endearing way, with a studied Midwestern care to his explanations. 

But both men speak of common influences, common eras and a mutually uncommon love for the art of improvisation.

There's a lot of talk about "new traditionalism" in jazz, but the two of you seem to be moving in an organic, less defined direction.

Frisell: It's hard to deny all the things that have happened on the guitar in the last 30 or 40 years. If I played a saxophone or trumpet, it would be a lot easier to fall into this classicism, whereas with guitar, you could just do a Wes Montgomery thing.

But if you're my age and grew up with the Beatles, Rolling Stones and Jimi Hendrix, you'd have to be more blatant.

Scofield: Both of us were at that age when the shit really changed, when white America completely embraced rock and roll. The Rolling Stones came over in 1964-1965, when I was just 13, and people were into jazz and blues and folk music and all that.

All of a sudden it was on TV, on Ed Sullivan – it overtook every kid's life. And it was rock and roll with country elements and blues elements, but everybody at that time was affected by it.

If there are young neoclassicists, it's easier for them because they are choosing to do one thing out of the past. But the reason I play the guitar – and I imagine why Bill did – was because there was great stuff on the radio.

I'm not a rock and roll player, and neither is Bill. But we were very influenced by that period. Both of us went to Berklee and wanted to be jazz guys. I went for a while with a big fat guitar, trying to sound like Jim Hall or Jimmy Raney or Wes Montgomery. But in the back of my mind I remembered B.B. King or Jeff Beck or Jimi Hendrix – this other sound.

Do you create a distinction between rock and jazz, or have the two genres, as in Naked City or Miles's band, become interdependent?

Frisell: Well, now I don't. There was a period when I had my fat guitar, an exact copy of Jim Hall's ES-175. And that was an incredibly valuable period, to really immerse myself in the harmonies. That's where all the building blocks of what I do now came from.

But then at a certain point this little bell went off and something just hit me: What I was doing wasn't honest. It was 1971, and I was pretending it was still 1956.

Scofield: On guitar, it seemed obvious to use the sounds of rock and roll in jazz. Why it hadn't been done before was because guys like Jim Hall didn't have it available – they didn't have that background.

When you develop on your instrument, you develop a sound, and that stays with you your whole life. Even though Miles Davis played electric music, he was still playing the trumpet with the sound he worked on for years.

So should Jim Hall get a fuzztone and play light strings and use a volume pedal? No, he's got his style, and that's what you get after developing. It's a chronological thing.

For me it seemed like the obvious thing to do. At some point, we thought, "Why not use those things in a jazz context?"

Do you think that guitar innovation is simply a matter of shifting elements from the past, or can a new musical vocabulary be created? Where is jazz guitar going?

Scofield: You know the Jaco story, right? When an interviewer asked him, "Where is jazz bass going today?" he got up and said, "It's going to the bathroom right now." [laughs]

Scofield: We all try to copy the people we love, and we learn from them, but you have to believe in yourself. If you open yourself up and let music come out, it's you.

The great thing about the guitar in jazz, especially for me and Bill, is there weren't as many greats back then. There were really only a few. And certain developments that happened in rock and roll guitar and country-western guitar and classical guitar were available for us to use to make ourselves sound different.

Where does the past leave you? Is it a burden or a blessing?

Frisell: It's a necessity – you've got to check it out. It's just a responsibility. If you're going to play, you'd better check out what was going on before.

This can get really philosophical: What are you? Are you unto yourself or are you part of the cosmic universal soul, which is probably more the truth. You've got to believe that this stuff comes through you and whatever comes out, you have to let it happen.

The next generation will get something from that, just because you're you. The people that we all love were special. Any great musician has that thing that's just them, and you accept people's deficiencies. You accept deficiencies in yourself and work on your strong points.

Bill just plays music, and he's not limited by "bebop," "rock," "country," or "classical." Everybody's so into categories, and I am too, because we have to talk about it, right? But after a certain point it just becomes use your imagination. It's just music. 

Let that sound inside you come out. That's what every great musician has done. Don't bother thinking about whether it's this or that.

You can order John Scofield’s latest album (above) here.

Don't miss our Guitar Player Presents John Scofield event this Thursday, April 14, in San Francisco.

Block out your diary today from 6PM GMT/1PM EST to join Robert Plant and Alison Krauss as they treat fans to a series of live performances celebrating the release of their latest album Raise the Roof.

Following the smash success of their Grammy award-winning 2007 debut LP Raising Sand, Robert Plant and Alison Krauss have once again teamed up with producer T Bone Burnett (guitarist with Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue).

The duo’s much-anticipated follow up album is due out tomorrow and features a host of stellar guitarists including Marc Ribot, David Hidalgo, Bill Frisell, and Buddy Miller.

Performing live renditions of choice tracks from Raise The Roof with their knockout band in Nashville’s Sound Emporium Studios the event can be viewed on either Robert Plant or Alison Krauss’s YouTube channels.

Click here to subscribe to Robert Plant’s YouTube channel.

Click here to subscribe to Alison Krauss’s YouTube channel.

And the fun doesn’t stop there. After the gig, at 7PM GMT/2PM EST, fans can immediately head over to NPR Music’s YouTube channel for a listening party where Plant and Krauss will be joining host Ann Powers to talk about their historic album. RSVP here.

Following the release of “Can’t Let Go,” “High and Lonesome,” and “It Don’t Bother Me” fans are now able to get a final peek at the album with “Somebody Was Watching Over Me.”

Buy Raise the Roof here.

In our previous instalment of this lesson, we looked at how to solo with chords, a technique that blurs the line between lead and rhythm playing. As we discussed, soloing with chords requires both a knowledge of music theory and the fretboard in order to use it creatively and technically. However, as we saw in the first batch of examples, it’s possible to develop knowledge and skill in this area through a series of conceptual and practical exercises.

Once again, our examples will focus on the genre of jazz, which will allow us to experiment with a wide range of melodic, harmonic and modal concepts and devices, from working with fundamental modes and harmonic contexts to resolving major and minor ii - V progressions.

These approaches can also be applied to other styles, such as blues, rock, soul/R&B and pop, and can improve your soloing skills and offer greater harmonic support and independence, especially when playing in a small ensemble, such as a guitar-bass-drums trio, as well as help you play lead using more than just single notes.

In this second and final part to our lesson, we’ll look at six examples that demonstrate the following:

• How to quickly describe a variety of fundamental modes and harmonic contexts (Dorian, Lydian, Mixolydian and altered-dominant) wherever you are on the fretboard.

• Useful and harmonically appropriate solutions for navigating the essential major and minor ii - V progressions all over the neck.

We’ll conclude this masterclass with an extended chord solo that demonstrates how all of these concepts and devices may be applied in a real-world musical context.

The examples presented here begin with Ex. 6, as they continue on from the last five examples in the previous instalment. As in part one, we’re using only one key center for each concept, for purposes of illustration and comparison, but transposing and applying these ideas to different keys and contexts is essential to properly absorb them, so be sure to do that on your own. 

Now dial in a clean, warm electric guitar tone, and let’s get started!

Rather than considering chords to only be unmovable blocks, it’s liberating to think of a key area or tonal environment and use chords derived from a scale or mode in a more fluid manner, particularly when “hanging out,” or vamping, on a single chord for several bars. This approach also offers more options for playing chords in conventional progressions.

Such great guitarists as Pat Metheny, Bill Frisell, Joe Dioro, Kenny Burrell, Emily Remler, Scott Henderson and Allan Holdsworth have employed this modal approach with brilliant results.

There are many modes and concepts to explore, but we’ll narrow things down here and focus on the highly appealing and useful Dorian, Lydian and Mixolydian modes, as well as the very tense-sounding altered-dominant-7th tonality.

Ex. 6 presents a number of great-sounding chords, all over the neck, that effectively describe the sound of the D Dorian mode (D, E, F, G, A, B, C), which is the second mode of the C major scale (C, D, E, F, G, A, B). The signature, or “character,” note of the Dorian mode, which is one of the major scale’s three minor modes, is its major 6th, which in D Dorian is B, and you’ll see that note appear in many of these voicings.

In Ex. 7, the fourth mode of C major, F Lydian (F, G, A, B, C, D, E) – with its raised, or “sharped,” 4th (#4), B, which may also be reckoned as the #11 – adds its characteristic beautifully “floating” quality to a major tonality. Lydian-based chord voicings and extensions work great when staying on a major 7 chord for two or more bars, and also for when the chord is not the “I” (one), and for ending chords too, even if it is the “I.”

The Mixolydian mode, which is a major mode characterized by its lowered, or “flatted,” 7th, is a top choice to play over a dominant 7th chord, with which it perfectly “agrees.” The voicings presented in Ex. 8 all live within G Mixolydian (G, A, B, C, D, E, F), which is the C major scale’s fifth mode and is made up of the same seven notes as that scale, as well as those of D Dorian and F Lydian, which in this case are all the natural notes (no sharps or flats).

The voicings shown here serve as useful chord-soloing options when playing over a stationary, or static, dominant-7 tonality, be it in a jazz context or a funk or blues setting.

In Ex. 9, the altered-dominant scale, also known as the super-Locrian mode, which is intervallically spelled 1, b2 (or b9), b3 (or #9), 3, #4 (or b5, or #11), #5 (or b13), b7, creates maximum dissonance and tension without “breaking” the dom7 chord. It contains the root, major 3rd and b7th to define its essential quality, but all other scale degrees are altered from their natural position, hence b9, #9, b5 and b13.

The A altered-dominant scale is spelled A, Bb, B# (or C), C#, Eb, F, G. Some players also include the natural 5th (as we’ve done here in a couple of the chords), which in this case is the note E. We’ve also included the natural 13th, F#, which creates a very John Scofield-esque sound, especially when paired with a #9 or b9.

These notes sound great over a dominant 7th chord with altered extensions and/or whenever you want to create heightened harmonic-melodic tension before resolving down a 5th or up a 4th to a major- or minor-type 7th chord. By the way, you’ll find it helpful to know that the altered-dominant scale, or super-Locrian mode, is the seventh mode of the melodic minor scale, which in this case would be b melodic minor (Bb, C, Db, Eb, F, G, A).

Let’s now turn our attention to the ubiquitous ii - V - I (two - five- one) cadence, or mini-progression, which is a fundamental cornerstone of jazz harmony that warrants complete theoretical and practical understanding for any aspiring jazz musician. It’s defined as a type of minor chord (as indicated by the lowercase Roman numeral “ii”) going up a 4th (or down a 5th) to a type of dominant 7th chord, which in turn then moves up a 4th (or down a 5th) to a root chord – the “one.”

There are two types of ii - V cadences: 1) major ii - V, which is minor 7 chord (m7), progressing to a dominant 7, and 2) minor ii - V, which is a minor-7 flat-5 chord (m7b5) moving to a dominant 7, which usually has “altered” extensions, such as b9, #9 and b13.

Major and minor ii - V cadences expect resolutions to major and minor chords, but counterexamples of unresolved, “roving” ii-Vs are numerous and well established in many jazz tunes. In Ex. 10, we’ve used the repeating progression Dm7 - G7 - Cmaj7 - Em7b5 - A7, which embeds both types of ii - V cadences very neatly and offers tons of scope for soloing.

For this example, we employed the voicings of Dm7, G7 and Cmaj7 from Examples 3–5 [see part one of “Learn How to Solo With Chords Jazz Style”] to create a major ii - V - I and a minor ii - V (by altering the 5th of the m7 voicings) in four different positions on the fretboard with the chords Em7b5 and A7b9. 

These voicings are great for harmonizing solos (as Joe Pass and Wes Montgomery did so well) and interjecting little comping patterns between single-note phrases.

Ex. 11 takes the shapes from last instalment's Ex. 5 and adds some extensions and alterations to create more flavor and flow. With these tools you can ultimately navigate a lot of standard jazz repertoire in any key and fretboard position.

All the concepts presented in parts one and two of this lesson come together in the chord solo presented here in Ex. 12. This solo demonstrates just one of countless possibilities that are available using these approaches and harmonic devices. 

Once you’ve learned the solo, have a go at building your own original chord solos using the materials presented in this two-part lesson as starting points.

Following the release of their lead single “Can’t Let Go” in August this year, Robert Plant and Alison Krauss have today released a second track – “High and Lonesome” – from their forthcoming album Raise the Roof. 

Produced by Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue guitarist T Bone Burnett the much anticipated long-player follows up 2007’s Grammy award-winning Raising Sand. Landing next month on November 19, Raise the Roof showcases a line-up of guitar luminaries including David Hidalgo, Buddy Miller, Bill Frisell, and Marc Ribot. 

The Plant/Burnett-penned “High and Lonesome” is the standout original track from Raise the Roof while the remaining songs on the album consist of covers (Bert Jansch, Calexico, Merle Haggard, The Everly Brothers, Anne Briggs, Allen Toussaint, and Geeshie Wiley being just some of the artists explored.)

“It’s such a far cry from everything I’ve done before,” commented Plant. “I love the whole kaleidoscope of music that I’ve explored, but this is a place where you can think within the song, you can decide how to bring home an emotion. It’s another blend that we’ve got, and long may we have more of them.”

“Working with Robert, and with T Bone, is always a great education in musical history,” adds Krauss.

Tracked at Sound Emporium Studios in Nashville, “High and Lonesome” features appearances by guitarist Marc Ribot (Tom Waits, Elvis Costello, John Zorn) and pedal steel player Russell Pahl (Yola, Dan Auerbach, Kings of Leon) while Burnett also lends his talents to electric guitar, mellotron, and vocals.

Pre-order your copy of Raise the Roof by Robert Plant and Alison Krauss here.

Following the smash success of their Grammy award-winning 2007 debut LP Raising Sand, Robert Plant and Alison Krauss have once again teamed up with producer T Bone Burnett (guitarist with Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue). 

The duo’s much-anticipated follow up album – Raise the Roof – is due out on November 19 and features a host of stellar guitarists including Marc Ribot, David Hidalgo, Bill Frisell, and Buddy Miller.

“We wanted it to move,” says Krauss. “We brought other people in, other personalities within the band, and coming back together again in the studio brought a new intimacy to the harmonies.”

“You hear something, and you go, ‘Man, listen to that song, we got to sing that song!’” adds Plant. “It’s a vacation, really – the perfect place to go that you least expected to find.”

Consisting of twelve new tracks, Raise the Roof showcases songs by a variety of artists such as Merle Haggard, The Everly Brothers, and British folk guitar hero Bert Jansch, as well as the Plant/Burnett-penned “High and Lonesome,” and the Grammy-nominated Lucinda Williams classic “Can’t Let Go.”

Ahead of the album’s release, Robert Plant and Alison Krauss have today shared their cover of Randy Williams’ composition “Can’t Let Go.” Powered by a locomotive rhythm, Plant and Krauss duet, “I got a big chain around my neck, And I’m broken down like a train wreck,” while Frisell provides some exemplary reverberated twang tones on electric guitar backed by Hidalgo on acoustic guitar.

Pre-order your copy of Raise the Roof by Robert Plant & Alison Krauss here.