The Bill Frisell Invitational Highlights This Year’s Alternative Guitar Summit

An annual event since 2010, the Alternative Guitar Summit is a festival of daring, inventive players who emphasize new and unusual approaches to the guitar. Pat Metheny, who was feted in last year’s event, had this to say about guitarist-promoter Joel Harrison’s pet project: “The work that Joel has done with this festival to showcase the development of the guitar and the expanded role that it has taken in music is a testament to the almost unlimited sonic dimensions the word ‘guitar’ can invoke in the imagination of musicians and fans alike.”

While Harrison has taken pride in presenting new inventive players at the AGS (this year’s three-day run from June 21-23 included such discoveries as Jeff Miles, Matteo Liberatore and Anthony Pirog), he is also mindful of paying tribute to esteemed masters of the instrument who are still active on the scene. This year’s AGS kicked off with a salute to innovative guitar master Bill Frisell. As Harrison, who first saw Frisell play in a 1977 duo performance, read to the audience before introducing the celebrated guitarist: “He under-plays everything, his notes a haiku. His rubbery tone contains celebration and mourning at the same time. He makes a hard tune sound easy, and he makes you laugh.”

This Bill Frisell Invitational had the honoree joined on the Le Poisson Rouge stage by four formidable fellow axemen in Julian Lage, Brandon Ross, Matt Munisteri and Marvin Sewell, each a distinctive player bringing singular qualities to the party. Backed by Frisell’s longtime reliable rhythm tandem of bassist Tony Scherr and drummer Kenny Wollesen, Frisell and his guitar army opened with a funky take on “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” that sounded more “Honky Tonk Women” than Hank Williams. With Frisell cue-ing the band and imbuing the melody with signature lyricism, this plaintive piece was embellished by Sewell’s emotive volume swell slide work on his Fender Telecaster guitar while Ross delivered bent-string blue notes on his Klein guitar solo and Lage nonchalantly tossed off melodic filigrees on his flowing Fender Telecaster solo. Ross and Frisell were featured with Scherr and Wolleson on a graceful rendition of Frisell’s haunting “Strange Meeting,” then Munisteri and Frisell paired up for a relaxed, rocking chair rendition of “Old Folks,” with Munisteri comping in fingerstyle fashion on his vintage Gibson L-5 and Frisell alternating between chordal magic and flurries of improvised lines that built off the melody.

Lage and Frisell next combined for tight unisons on the swinging Benny Goodman-Charlie Christian staple “Seven Come Eleven” and followed with a gorgeous reading of the jazz standard “The Days Of Wine and Roses” that began with Lage comping and Frisell implying the melody with a fragmented approach informed as much by Thelonious Monk as Jim Hall.