“The guitar is like this magic wand. It’ll take you to these places that you never imagined.” Bill Frisell opens up about imagination, collaboration and the heavily modified Telecaster guiding his new album

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.”