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Bill Frisell: The Intercontinentals

 A l b u m   D e t a i l s


Label: Elektra Nonesuch
Released: 2003.04.15
Time:
 70:27
Category: Ethno Jazz, Folk Jazz
Producer(s): Lee Townsend
Rating:
Media type: CD
Web address: www.billfrisell.com
Appears with:
Purchase date: 2016
Price in €: 1,00





 S o n g s ,   T r a c k s


[1] Boubacar (B.Frisell) - 6:13
[2] Good Old People (B.Frisell) - 5:25
[3] For Christos (B.Frisell) - 6:13
[4] Baba Drame (Traoré) - 5:18
[5] Listen (B.Frisell) - 6:47
[6] Anywhere Road (B.Frisell) - 1:52
[7] Procissão" (Gil) - 6:43
[8] The Young Monk (Traditional) - 2:23
[9] We Are Everywhere (B.Frisell) - 7:06
[10] Yála (Govetas) - 5:47
[11] Perritos (Cantuaria) - 4:33
[12] Magic (B.Frisell) - 5:54
[13] Eli (B.Frisell) - 4:15
[14] Remember (B.Frisell) - 1:36

 A r t i s t s ,   P e r s o n n e l


Bill Frisell - Electric Guitar on [1-7,9,10,12-14], Acoustic Guitar on [5,7], Nylon String Guitar on [8,11], Baritone Guitar on [4], Bass on [13], Loop on [1,3,5-7,9,12,13]
Christos Govetas - Vocals on [7-9], Oud on [1-3,5,7-10,12,13], Bouzouki on [4]
Greg Leisz - Asher Lap Steel on [1,4,12], Pedal Steel Guitar on [2,3,5,6,9,11,14], National Lap Steel on [7], Scheerhorn Resonator Guitar on [13], Loop on [1,3,5,12]
Vinicius Cantuaria - Voice on [1,7,9,11,13], Electric Guitar on [5,7,9,11], Nylon String Guitar on [2], Snare Drum on [1,3,12,13], Bass Drum on [1,3,12,13], Triangle on [2]
Sidiki Camara - Vocals on [4,12], Calabash on [1-5,7,9-13], Shaker on [1-5,7,9-13], Cymbals on [1-5,7,9,11-13], Djembe on [2,4,7,9,10,12], Congas on [11]
Jenny Scheinman - Violin on [2-7,9,12-14], Harmony Vocal on [7]

Lee Townsend - Producer
Tucker Martine - Engineer, Mixing
Greg Calbi - Mastering
Justin Lieberman - Pro-Tools
Floyd Reitsman - Pro-Tools
Michael Wilson - Photography
Doyle Partners - Design
Tom Schierlitz - Audio Equipment Photos

 C o m m e n t s ,   N o t e s


Recorded at Studio Litho, Seattle. Mixed at Different Fur Recording, San Francisco. Mastered at Sterling Sound, New York City.



It's time to admit a bias. Anyone who covers Boubacar Traoré automatically scores points in my book. The Malian guitarist is infinitely remote to anyone outside Mali, but that isn't for any good reason except the vagaries of the recording industry. It's fitting that guitarist Bill Frisell would choose "Boubacar" as the opener to The Intercontinentals given the international flavor of the record, the omnipresence of Malian percussionist Sidiki Camara, and the way blues from Mali builds feeling and depth from simple cyclical structures. Frisell and his quintet use loops to reinforce a constant turnover; they never stray into complexity or density, and they hit the one like it's a slice of heaven. I guess they've checked Boubacar out. With eerie voice snippets and dramatic reverberant twang, The Intercontinentals also stamp it all their own.

A few words about the players and styles on this record. Obviously Frisell made a conscious choice to surround himself with an international crew (from Brazil, Mali, Greece, Los Angeles, and New York) and to pursue tunes that never stop in the same place twice. That's the main distinction of The Intercontinentals and the feature which lends it strength. Whatever traditions the group chooses to salute, purity is never part of

the equation, and that's absolutely key. And the fact that everyone plays either strings or percussion certainly flavors the sound accordingly.

In recent years Frisell has turned ever closer toward American heartland music, replacing his previous maverick self with a regular-guy country persona. To be honest, that has been a disappointing trend since it has boxed him in and withdrawn much of the color from his music. He certainly doesn't suffer from a lack of imagination, though, and it's nice to see that put to good use on this record. The country aspect never leaves the music (there's enough lap and pedal steel in the hands of Greg Leisz to build a skyscraper), but it gets a needed infusion from all angles.

Frisell matches his by now trademark lush and reverberant guitar sound with the emphatic singularity of the oud and the organic slide of the violin. "Listen" and " Good Old People" have a warm, easy tendency toward resolution. On Boubacar's "Baba Drame" Sidiki Camara adds vocals. The expectant funk of "Prociss'o" rides with harmonized Brazilian vocals and a down home bluegrass prance. The brief "Young Monk" is the only acoustic piece, a duet where Frisell's nylon string guitar supports trilling, accented minor melodies on Christos Govetas' oud. An oddly symphonic blues drives "Eli," only to wind down with the record's sad, pared-down closer, "Remember."

In the end the buoyancy of a multifaceted band, eclectic voicings, and creative choice of material render The Intercontinentals an unqualified success. I'd rather Frisell replace his Americana obsession with something a little more interesting; this recording certainly represents a huge leap in the right direction.

AAJ STAFF - July 25, 2003
© 2016 All About Jazz



For some time now, Bill Frisell has been content exploring American music-and why not? The folk, country and jazz that informs his music has helped stamp Frisell with a personal sound and compositional style that is thoroughly American but completely different than anyone else's.

But with this new band, the Intercontinentals, Frisell looks well beyond American shores. Sure, there are familiar elements here: pedal-steel player and frequent Frisell collaborator Greg Leisz sits in, and Jenny Scheinman fills the violin chair. But then there are the new parts of the band: Malian percussionist Sidiki Camara, Macedonian oud/clarinet/bouzouki player Christos Govetas and Brazilian singer/guitarist/percussionist Vinicius Cantu ria.

Does Frisell subsume all these new voices into his idiomatic music, or does he go somewhere else entirely? The answer, refreshingly, is he does a bit of both.

"Boubacar," a tribute to the Malian guitarist/singer Boubacar Traore, opens with an unmistakably Frisellian gesture-a twangy ascending minor triad-and it's instantly clear that this is Frisell's music, not a pastiche of Traore's. On tunes like that bit of cowboy noir, or the upbeat and sunshiny "Good Old People," Frisell unrolls his now-familiar sun-warped and ambling melodies, which sometimes turn up a sharp edge but always give each tune a backbone. Rather than harmonic changes driving the music, everyone plays off the melody or else adds tiny details here and there, but more often than not Frisell or Leisz are at the center of things.

About two-thirds of The Intercontinentals falls into the styles of "Boubacar" and "Good Old People"; there are places, however, where Frisell gives up the leader role and switches to that of the noble accompanist. That's when the CD loosens up and gets interesting. On his bluesy and dancing cover of Traore's "Baba Drame," Frisell lays the foundation with a ringing accompaniment and turns the tune over to Camara's vocals and percussion. Then on "Y la," Frisell finds ways to slip his characteristic playing into Govetas' oud-centric composition.

The Intercontinentals may not expose a completely new side of Frisell, but it does range further afield than he has in a long time and the CD satisfies on all counts.

Aaron Steinberg - May 2003
© 1999–2015 JazzTimes



The course that Bill Frisell has taken since his 1997 album Nashville has proven vexing to many who were originally pulled in by the guitarist’s more straightforward jazz work with Paul Motian or his avant-squonk work with John Zorn’s Naked City. There’s no question that Frisell trained as a jazz guitarist and that he can play in the idiom, but his more recent music has veered into an area that truly defies genre, even though many try to pin him to one or another. The phrase that rears its head most frequently is “Americana”. While Frisell is working with such American genres as folk, country, blues, and jazz, he also creates music of great space and meditativeness that sometimes recalls the music of other places as well. Some maintain that Frisell isn’t doing anything very interesting or even original, citing the idiomatic folk period of Pat Metheny captured on albums such as New Chautauqua and As Falls Wichita So Falls Wichita Falls or the entire oeuvre of John Fahey.

On the surface, Frisell’s recent recordings do bear a certain resemblance to the two Metheny albums mentioned. Both artists seem to create a music that is wide open, evoking the big sky and open road of rural America. But for Metheny, it was enough to simply evoke such sounds; Frisell has immersed himself in them. Since Nashville, he has often surrounded himself with musicians steeped in the genres that he sought to incorporate into his music, from Jim Keltner, Jerry Douglas, and members of Alison Krause’s Union Station group to Dave Holland and Elvin Jones. Frisell’s unique, singing guitar sound, augmented by tape loops, has remained a shimmering constant, tying his experiments in musical mixology together. And whereas Fahey labored under a certain conception of authenticity, Frisell makes no such attempt, preferring to allow the depth of musical feeling that the musicians put into the music create its own level of authenticity. This is one reason that Frisell maddens jazz fans or indeed anyone seeking to put a label on him.

On The Intercontinentals, Frisell has surrounded himself with an international coterie of excellent musicians in an attempt to incorporate sounds and musics from around the world into his grab bag. The result is pure Frisell, yet it is tinged with an international flavor. What makes it a great album and one of Frisell’s most successful statements is that at no time does it sound like he said “hey, let’s graft some exotic international instruments onto what I’m doing.” The entire project sounds as though it grew very organically, as did such previous Frisell releases as Nashville, Blues Dream, and Bill Frisell with Dave Holland and Elvin Jones.

Frisell has assembled an impressive crew of guests for this recording. Vinicius Cantuaria, with whom Frisell has previously recorded, provides some gorgeous guitar work (listen to the stunning interplay between Frisell and Cantuaria, topped by Greg Leisz’s pedal steel guitar). The sound is similar to that found on Cantuaria’s 2001 album Vinicius. On many other tracks, Cantuaria plays snare and bass drum. Also included are Malian percussionist Sidiki Camara, master of the oud and bouzouki Christos Govetas, pedal steel guitarist Greg Leisz, and violinist Jenny Scheinman.

Malian guitarist Boubacar Traore’s spirit hangs over the proceedings, as the disc opens with a Frisell composition in his honor (“Boubacar”) and the group takes on Boubacar’s Malian blues “Baba Drame”. It’s amazing how much this composition has in common with American blues, and Frisell and his associates certainly emphasize these common elements. Camara employs calabsh, djembe, shaker, and cymbals, but you could easily think, if you heard this on a scratchy vinyl recording, that it was an old Appalachian folk song accompanied by tin cans and washboards.

Another standout track is the group’s interpretation of Gilberto Gil’s “Procissao” which opens with deeply foreboding, sustained bass notes, followed by rhythmic interplay between violin and guitar before Frisell begins to play bluesy fills, at which point Govetas bursts in with the Portuguese lyrics. The whole thing continues to build throughout its six plus minute length, climaxing in some energetic, psuedo-bottleneck antics. The very next track, the traditional “The Young Monk” finds Frisell’s nylon string guitar and Govetas’s oud melding perfectly. It’s Frisell’s secret formula—a group sound where various instruments rise and fall in the listener’s attention, with little regard for traditional notions of “solo” and “ensemble”. In this respect, Frisell is continuing to work with one of the great ideas brought forth in modern jazz: “no one solos/everyone solos”. Miles Davis used it on recordings such as In a Silent Way and Bitches Brew, and it was the reason that Weather Report never sounded much like any other so-called “fusion” band.

Frisell may not be playing what many jazz fans consider jazz, nor is he playing “world” music with any claims to authentically reproducing the music of a specific region. The whole point of Frisell’s exercise is that he is capable of combining the sounds and textures of other musical forms into something new and yet is able to stamp it with the unmistakable Bill Frisell “brand”. And he is able to do all of that while creating music that is simultaneously adventurous, beautiful, and full of depth. That, kids, is exactly what being a musician is all about.

Marshall Bowden - 2 September 2003
© 1999-2016 PopMatters.com



Bill Frisell has been actively - some would say obsessively - exploring the depths and dimensions of American roots music since the release of Nashville in 1997. His subsequent recordings - Ghost Town, Gone Just Like a Train, Blues Dream, Good Dog, Happy Man, and The Willies - were all approaches to the various folk styles that originated on American soil: country, blues, bluegrass, field hollers, jazz, and others. He has successfully been able to blend, extract, adapt, and otherwise morph one set of music onto another through his own approach to guitar playing - the song. More than any other contemporary guitarist, Frisell is driven by the notion of song - what it entails, both in terms of musical and cultural expression, and what it implies. On The Intercontinentals, Frisell continues his investigation of American music, but as a way of understanding how it entwines with the folk musics of other nations. Onboard for this outing are Frisell's longtime collaborators Jenny Scheinman; pedal, dobro, and lap steel guitarist Greg Leisz; as well as Brazilian mega-guitarist and songwriter Vinicius Cantuaria; Macedonian vocalist and oud player Christos Govetas and Malian percussionist and vocalist Sidikki Camara. Frisell had played with Camara and Malian uber-guitarist Boubacar Traore a couple of years before and was intrigued enough to explore the connection further. The result of this unlikely union is one of the most seamlessly beautiful works Frisell has ever produced. On it, he and Cantuaria delve into the modern Malian guitar and percussion sound pioneered by Ali Farka Toure; blend it with the timeless emotional resonance of Greek folk songs via Govetas' oud and infectious Brazilian lyricism; and filter it through shimmering country landscapes and otherworldly string textures that reinvent harmonic properties to suit the lyric of the blues, song, indigenous folk musics, and the contemporary improvisational ideal. Frisell composed the lion's share of the tunes here, but there are also contributions by Gilberto Gil, Traore, Govetas, and Cantuaria. Scheinman's violin acts as a gorgeous signpost for virtually all of these musicians to return to; her melodic sensibility and crisp tone are beacons in the often swirling, escalating, and/or cascading whorls of plucked strings, playing as many as four melodies simultaneously with winding, almost knotty scalar interchanges. What is most fascinating is that even in the vocal tunes, or those where the Malian blues effect is the prominent force, everything else in the mix fans out and creates often contrapuntal backdrops for elegant and lush, if dense, textures. Simply put, this is the busiest record Frisell has made in years, but it doesn't feel like it. His sense of "song" is so pervasive, everything here is arranged to fit its "singing." His own tone is unmistakable, as is Leisz's and Cantuaria's. The guitars are as distinct as the oud and the violin, all of them carried into the next space by hand drums. While each song does stand on its own as a harmonic and lyrical entity, with adventurous improvisation added in the spirit of true exploration, as an album they are linked by the weave of aural tapestry, dynamics, and spaciousness that is so central to Frisell's sound. And while this is more collaborative than perhaps anything he's done in a decade, it nonetheless bears his sonic and esthetic imprint. This is a remarkable album; its sets a new watermark for Frisell's sense of adventure and taste, and displays his perception of beauty in a pronounced, uncompromising, yet wholly accessible way.

Thom Jurek - All Music Guide



The Intercontinentals is the 16th album by Bill Frisell to be released on the Elektra Nonesuch label. It was released in 2003 and features performances by Frisell, Sidiki Camara, Vinicius Cantuaria, Christos Govetas, Greg Leisz and Jenny Scheinman. The Allmusic review by Thom Jurek awarded the album 4.5 stars stating "This is a remarkable album; its sets a new watermark for Frisell's sense of adventure and taste, and displays his perception of beauty in a pronounced, uncompromising, yet wholly accessible way."

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