The Guitar Has a Thousand Faces: Bill Frisell, Bonny Light Horseman and Los Lobos at Big Ears

Bill Frisell played six sets at this month’s Big Ears Festival in Knoxville, Tenn., each set with a different band and a different sound. One was orchestral music with the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra. Two were chamber music with a pair of different trios playing compositions by avant-gardist John Zorn. Two were leading-edge jazz music with trios led by Charles Lloyd and Tyshawn Sorey. The other gig had Frisell leading his own quartet through material that reflected all these influences and more.

This versality was almost as important to Frisell’s brilliant playing as his emotional lyricism. Some would argue that his ability to cross the boundaries between genres is proof that musical categories are meaningless and should be abolished. I would argue the opposite. These categories are in fact essential. Each genre has its own history and its own vocabulary, different from every other genre. It’s this distinction between styles that gives the musician a wide spectrum of flavors to choose from.

If there were no borders separating one variety from the next, if there weren’t hard-headed traditionalists maintaining each local or weird sound in an isolated corner of the globe, music would gradually become one undifferentiated monoculture, yielding a bland sameness like the chain restaurants that destroy regional cuisines. So I say hurray for boundaries. Hurray for categories.

Bill Frisell and Charles Lloyd at Big Ears Festival

On April 2, the four-day festival’s finale, the Bill Frisell Four played in Knoxville’s restored movie palace, the Bijou (smaller and more restrained than the city’s gaudier, cavernous Tennessee Theatre). Frisell, wearing a pinstripe jacket over a red-and-gold plaid shirt with his thinning white hair combed back, coaxed a whole smorgasbord of sounds from his black-and-white Telecaster.

On the first number, for example, he began with a fetching melody that hinted at the Appalachian folk music he loves so much, but soon that transitioned into dissonant notes and clashing juxtapositions. On the second number, he tapped on his foot pedal to lend a rock ‘n’ roll distortion to his melody. On the third, this childhood fan of the Ventures and Beach Boys tapped the pedals again for a surf-guitar buzz.

None of this turned his richly tuneful modern jazz into country music, free jazz, classic-rock or surf-rock. These borrowed flavors enhanced Frisell’s signature sound without displacing it. These were spices, not main ingredients. Learning the vocabularies of other genres didn’t alter his musical identity; it merely gave him more tools to express himself.

This line-up—featuring drummer Jonathan Blake, pianist Gerald Clayton and reed player Greg Tardy—released its terrific first album last year, Four, and stretched out on those pieces on stage. Eschewing the conventional jazz approach of theme-solo-solo-solo-theme, the quartet mixed solos with duets and sudden shifts in mood and texture. They proved just how flexible and stimulating jazz can be—and how the guitar can be the perfect conduit for non-jazz influences to enter the music.

That was obvious when Frisell joined bassist Thomas Morgan in the Charles Lloyd Chapel Trio on Saturday at Big Ears. The quartet’s 2022 album, Chapel, was one of the year’s best, ranging from the jazz classic, Billy Strayhorn’s “Blood Count,” to the Lloyd original “Beyond Darkness” and the Cuban folk song “Ay Amor.” The group played all three of these at Big Ears, and Frisell was able to shift gears from canonical jazz guitar to dreamy balladry to Caribbean lilt.

The set’s highlight, though, was the American folk song “Shenandoah” with its intoxicating, irresistible melody. At first, Lloyd played the vocal line on tenor sax while Frisell created a countermelody that fit like a jigsaw puzzle piece. Then they switched roles. When Frisell soloed, it was as if he were playing a one-man duet, the single-note theme alternating with contextual broken chords.

Every year for decades Frisell and tenor saxophonist Joe Lovano had played in the Paul Motian Trio at the Village Vanguard in Greenwich Village. When the drummer died in 2011, after recording 19 dazzling albums with Frisell and Lovano, it left a gaping hole in American music.

At Big Ears, however, Frisell and Lovano joined leader/drummer Tyshawn Sorey for a very similar trio. Sorey has his own personality as a percussionist, of course, but the same sense of telepathic rapport and elastic time prevailed. (Lovano also led another exhilarating, bass-less threesome at Big Ears: Trio Tapestry with pianist Marilyn Crispell and Motian-like drummer Carmen Castaldi.)

But jazz bands weren’t the only ones taking advantage of the guitar’s boundary-crossing powers. One of the festival’s best sets was turned in by the folk trio Bonny Light Horseman, whose album Rolling Golden Holy, was also a highlight of last year. The group’s most obvious assets are its two lead voices: the robust tenor of the Fruit Bats’ Eric D. Johnson and the emotionally translucent soprano of Anais Mitchell, best known for writing the Broadway hit Hadestown.

Bonny Light Horseman (from left: Josh Kaufman, Eric D. Johnson and Anais Mitchell) at the Big Ears Festival

Their harmonies at Big Ears were gorgeous, but something else lifted the songs from the merely pretty, merely sensitive, into something more substantial and dramatic. And that something else was the electric guitar of Josh Kaufman, best known for producing the National, the Hold Steady, Josh Ritter and Bob Weir. As Johnson and Mitchell sang of yearning for absent love or a missing lover, Kaufman’s guitar measured the distance between those wishes and their fulfillment. Against the traditional picking of Johnson’s banjo and Mitchell’s acoustic guitar, Kaufman’s fluid, chamber-rock lines pulled the songs out of a mythologized past into the fraught present.

Bonny Light Horseman’s 2020 debut album was devoted to traditional folk songs, mostly from the British Isles, while its 2022 follow-up was devoted to the trio’s original compositions in the same mode. In both cases, it was Kaufman’s guitar (and studio production) that introduced a modern awareness of how precarious our fondest hopes really are. Snaking through the lovely singing and acoustic instruments, the guitar took the songs’ folk elements and twisted them into indie-rock knots to suggest the shadows of loss.

This was even more obvious on stage in Knoxville than it is on the recordings. In his bushy, salt-and-pepper beard and blue blazer, Kaufman kept pushing the music out of its comfort zone into something more ambitious. His guitar was the bridge that connected these old musical styles to our modern lives. Once again, it was the existence of separate genres and a guitarist’s ability to draw from each that made the music so special.

It was the same story when Los Lobos played the opening day at Big Ears. The band has long woven the threads of Mexican folk music, swamp-pop, 1960s garage-rock, 1980s roots-rock and jam-band improvisation into an unlikely whole. Making this possible were the group’s two guitarists: David Hidalgo and Cesar Rosas. The two men have such good command of these sources that they can pluck sounds from any genre without that mental glitch that happens when you’re translating from a language you only half know.

Los Lobos at the Big Ears Festival

In this set, Los Lobos eschewed their best known songs—“La Bamba” and “Will the Wolf Survive”—to dig deeper into their inspirations. The show began with a semi-acoustic set of seven songs with Hidalgo on acoustic guitar and button accordion, Rosas on acoustic guitar and maracas and lyricist Louie Perez on jarana. Three of these songs were sung in Spanish and recalled the early days when they entertained recent immigrants in the Mexican restaurants of East Los Angeles.

When they strapped on electric guitars for “Set Me Free (Rosa Lee),” the propulsive rocker gathered momentum and climaxed in a long, Grateful Dead-like improvisation that featured a jabbering dialogue between Hidalgo’s guitar and Steve Berlin’s soprano sax. It was a reminder that they were rock’n’roll fans even as they were playing in those taquerias.

And it was those simultaneous experiences that made their recordings so special. If there hadn’t been a clear boundary between the folk music and the psychedelic-rock, the combination would never have produced such sparks. They nodded to yet other influences when they played “Flat Top Boogie,” bluesy rockabilly from their L.A. friends the Blasters, “Love Special Delivery” by the legendary Chicano-rockers Thee Midniters, and “Ay There Dejo en San Antonio” by Tex-Mex legend Santiago Jimenez (Flaco’s father).

No one has created a more distinctive new voice on the guitar in this new century than Mary Halvorson. Playing a large, blond archtop, she subverts the instrument’s expected fluidity and momentum by favoring prickly fragments, interrupted progressions and stabbing, off-kilter rhythm accents. Her approach forces us to hear the guitar in a new way. But we are likely to enjoy it more in some contexts than in others.

Her unusual style is a counterargument to prevailing notions, so it’s most effective when it has something to argue against. When she’s playing with musicians who offer echoes of her style rather than contrasts, the results are often too arid and intellectual. But when her style is up against a pleasurable melody or harmony—especially one with a legato feel—the dramatic dialogue can be thrilling.

On Friday afternoon at Big Ears, she played back-to-back sets at the Bijou with the two bands that helped her record her 2022 albums: Amaryllis and Belladonna. The Amaryllis Sextet—featuring drummer Tomas Fujiwara, bassist Nick Dunston, vibist Patricia Brennan, trumpeter Adam O’Farrill and trombonist Jacob Garchik—played the early show with mixed results. When the horns and/or vibes provided enough thematic material for Halvorson to joust with, the set had its moments. But when she dug into her brittle note clusters and staccato rhythms, there was too little sensual pleasure to support the ideas.

The late show was better. The Mivos Quartet, a classical chamber music group that had earlier played the string quartets of composer Steve Reich, joined Halvorson on her compositions from Belladonna. The four bowed instruments supplied a welcome contrast with the plectrum instrument and made for a satisfying back and forth. By luring the guitarist from the insular jazz bubble of New York into the world of contemporary art music, Mivos encouraged Halvorson to try a new vocabulary with welcome results.

The best guitar album released thus far this year is Julian Lage’s Layers. The guitarist’s regular road trio—featuring drummer Dave King of Bad Plus and Peruvian bassist Jorge Roeder—was joined in the studio by Lage’s most obvious role model, Bill Frisell. The six compositions by Lage are patiently paced and tastefully arranged to allow plenty of time and space for the four musicians to explore the attractive themes and suggestive chord changes.

The album was produced by Lage’s wife, the singer-songwriter Margaret Glaspy. She headlined a Big Ears set of her own originals backed by Lage, King and Roeder. Her songs are standard Americana fare, but their tunes and stories gave the backing trio a chance to demonstrate how their involvement in the pop music world informs their jazz playing—and vice versa. They understand the value of a succinct statement of melody or statement, but they also know how to evolve those materials into something more complicated and surprising.

The Big Ears Festival had many highlights that weren’t guitar-centric. Lonnie Holley’s set resembled a gospel service on Saturn. The Greg Tardy Tentet (plus a narrator) offered an ambitious jazz updating of John Bunyan’s 1678 allegory, The Pilgrim’s Progress. Terry Allen & the Panhandle Mystery Band played West Texas, cosmic-cowboy songs with help from vocalist Shannon McNally. Jazz pianist Brian Marsella turned in two impressive trio sets. Cecile McLorin Salvant reinvented both jazz singing and pop singing with a dazzling set.

John Zorn, the New York composer who writes prolifically within the classical, jazz and rock traditions, was once again the featured artist at Big Ears. Ten different sets with 10 different bands performed his works at the majestically restored Tennessee Theatre. Zorn acted as MC for every show but let the musicians interpret the pieces without him.

The highlight of these often-splendid sets was the Saturday lunchtime trio of Frisell, Lage and Gyan Riley, the first two on steel-string acoustic guitars, and the third on a nylon-string instrument. Riley, the son of famed classical composer Terry Riley, is a well regarded classical guitarist, but he proved as willing and able to cross boundaries as his partners. The three acoustic guitars all occupy the same pitch register with very similar timbres, and it seemed unlikely that they could avoid getting in each other’s way.

But they never did. Zorn’s writing ingeniously traced a different path through the themes and chords that always supported each other and never conflicted. The beguiling pieces, collectively titled Nove Cantici per Francesco d’Assisi, seemed to draw from both Spanish and Italian chamber music and Appalachian string bands. The three players, seated in a semi-circle on stage, read the scores on their music stands and played flawlessly.

At a certain point, they would move into improvisation while sustaining the no-conflict approach. When someone grabbed the foreground with a solo, the other two didn’t disappear into simple comping, as in most jazz situations, but constructed fascinating countermelodies. The set was one of the week’s biggest surprises and most pleasurable hours.

The guitar is no longer the dominant instrument in Anglo-American music, as it was in the second half of the 20th century. But because it was connected to so many strands within that fertile half century, the instrument remains the best possible link to those various styles—genres that can still add old spices to new music.