For a German it is a bit disturbing how similar Bill Frisell and Harald Schmidt look like. They even smile in a similar way. So, I cannot really guarantee that I saw Bill Frisell on stage in Moers, maybe he was covered by Schmidt as a "stunt double"...
As I have already said before, this gig didn't impress me. It started in a rather free, abstract, atonal and promising way and turned into a fusion / jazz-rock jam after about 20 minutes. Don't get me wrong, I'm not against fusion / jazz-rock, but Frisell seemed a bit lazy to me. When once he has spontaneously invented (or recalled) a riff, he kept playing it over and over again for too long, with hardly any variation. His handwriting remained still Frisell-ish from the point of view of sound. After the rocking had started, Eyving Kang on the other hand sounded quite like the famous fusion violinists of the 70's, Jean-Luc or Don-Sugarcane. If there were no chairs indicating that this was a listener's rather than a dancer's concert, the whole thing might have been better. But possibly even the musicians themselves didn't know in advance that they were going to rock away the way they did. While from the microscopic point of view (e.g. the aforementioned riff repetitions of Frisell) the concert seemed not spontaneous enough, I believe that on the macroscopic scale of the players' interactions not too much was discussed in advance. I guess they were letting things flow and surprising the audience and themselves with the results. Yes, improvisation.
June 3, 2010
Bill Frisell, Eyvind Kang & Rudy Royston live in Moers 2010
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3 comments:
I think that the biggest problem that caused disappointment with Frisell's show was that he had given people too much expectation when he said that whenever he was working with those two companion musicians, there were always unpredictable pleasant surprise.
Although he looks really like a nice enough person, nevertheless, to be a brilliant musician, is not run for a 'nice citizen' contest.
Oh, he can be a brilliant musician - when playing a "Romance with the Unseen" with Don Byron, when doing moodful country music speaking about Good Dogs and Happy Men, or when composing/improvising for and with string quartet, inspired by the paintings of Gerhard Richter. So there can be more to him than just being a nice citizen. And anyway, I really liked his second concert with Arve Henriksen the other day.
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