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Bill Frisell: The Willies

 A l b u m   D e t a i l s


Label: Elektra Nonesuch
Released: 2002.06.11
Time:
 66:15
Category: 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] Sittin’ on Top of the World (Lonnie Chatmon / Walter Vinson) - 3:59
[2] Cluck Old Hen (Traditional) - 3:53
[3] Everybody Loves Everybody (B.Frisell) - 3:42
[4] I Want to Go Home (B.Frisell) - 4:15
[5] Single Girl, Married Girl (A. P. Carter) - 3:57
[6] Get Along (B.Frisell) - 3:23
[7] John Hardy Was a Desperate Little Man (Traditional) - 5:17
[8] Sugar Baby (Traditional) - 3:51
[9] Blackberry Blossom (Traditional) - 4:20
[10] If I Could I Surely Would (B.Frisell) - 6:46
[11] Cluck Old Hen [reprise] (Traditional) - 1:50
[12] Cold, Cold Heart (Hank Williams) - 2:25
[13] I Know You Care (B.Frisell) - 3:12
[14] Goodnight Irene (Lead Belly / John A. Lomax) - 3:55
[15] Big Shoe (B.Frisell) - 4:51
[16] The Willies (B.Frisell) - 6:24

 A r t i s t s ,   P e r s o n n e l


Bill Frisell - Electric & Acoustic Guitars, Loops
Danny Barnes - Banjo, Guitar, Pump Organ, Bass Harmonica
Keith Lowe - Bass

Greg Calbi - Mastering
Tucker Martine - Engineer, Mixing Engineer
Adam Muñoz - Assistant Engineer
Gwen Terpstra - Design
Lee Townsend - Producer
Michael Wilson - Photography

 C o m m e n t s ,   N o t e s


2002 CD Nonesuch - 79652-2

Recorded in May 2000 and March 2001 at the Flora Avenue Studio, Seattle, WA.



Ostensibly a jazz guitarist, Bill Frisell is currently blurring the accepted boundaries between genres. In much the same way as rock bands such as Wilco or Giant Sand are chiselling from what some would regard as the opposite end, Frisell has, starting with hints on earlier albums, blossomed into as much a country gent as a chin-stroking jazzer. Albeit one who will never don the stetson and tread the boards of the Opry.

From the aforementioned hints, Bill finally came out of the rustic closet and grasped the country horns with both hands on his 1995 album Nashville. Featuring dobro genius Jerry Douglas, it confirmed what those in the know had guessed long before - that Bill was a genuwine country picker. Subsequent releases never shied from the agenda. 2000's Ghost Town featured Hank's "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry" while last year's Blues Dream seemed to exist in the lonely 3am spaces that separate Blues, Jazz and Country. With impeccable timing he now brings us The Willies - his bluegrass album.

Assisted only by Danny Barnes on Banjo and Keith Lowe on Bass, this is of course Frisell's own take on the flavour du jour. If you come to this little number expecting to hear the manic attack of Union Station or even the traditional jauntiness of say, Bill Monroe, you'll be disappointed. This is a gentle, almost ambient album, redolent of a summer's day picnicking in a meadow, as opposed to a good old knees-up 'round a jug of something illicit.

Starting with a take on Howlin' Wolf's "Sittin' On Top Of The World", they proceed to mix originals with standards (again, Hank's "Cold, Cold Heart") in a deceptively loose, jamming format. Simple chord progressions propel fluid guitar lines over the heads of riffing banjo and bass. These tunes go back to the very heart of extemporisation; the very root of Jazz itself. "Cluck Little Hen" places Bill's improvisations back in the farmyard where it all began. Indeed, history is breathing softly but steadily down the necks of each of these little treasures, particularly on the Carter Family's "John Hardy Was A Desperate Little Man".

It'll take a few listens before you fully grasp the strength in this approach, and at 16 tracks the album commits the cardinal crime of modern recorded music: it hangs around a little too long. Nevertheless, The Willies has more than enough charm to overcome such shortcomings. Downhome and tasty!

Chris Jones - 2002
BBC Review



nd it's back to the metaphorical boondocks for Bill Frisell, where, with a glass of lemonade (or Hooch) in one hand and a guitar in the other, he kicks back on the porch with his pals and records another album of jazz-informed folk and country. This is something he's explored for the past few years, ever since his 1997 album Nashville (recorded with session players like Jerry Douglas, Viktor Krauss, and members of Alison Krauss' Union Station) deservedly won 'album of the year' from Downbeat. He proved how well his own style - the slight twang in his sustained electric tones, and the echoes of steel pedal guitar - could work with this kind of music.

Frisell put together a touring band called The Willies, featuring maniac avant-fiddler Eyvind Kang, banjo fiend Danny Barnes of progressive bluegrass band Bad Livers, and bassist Keith Lowe. This 'new bluegrass' (xFC-grass?) project toured America and Europe playing a set of new Frisell tunes and classics like "Cluck Old Hen" and "Sugar Baby." His new record documents the band, but it comes up short: Kang mysteriously wasn't included, leaving the other three Willies to pick and haw through an album that's faithful and accurate, yet not that adventurous.

In spite of Nashville's success, Frisell's Americana phase has received mixed reactions: at its best it's finger-pickin' good, with Frisell setting up great jam sessions with top country and bluegrass musicians. At its worst, Frisell plays picturesque music that's thick with nostalgia, an ongoing homage to "Home On the Range" that masks the edgier facets of his playing. Some fans have complained that Frisell won't turn up the volume and return to his Noisy Bill period of the late eighties, when he was shredding across New York City. But there's absolutely nothing wrong with Quiet Bill, whose gorgeous tone and impeccable sense of collaboration make him the foremost balladeers of today's jazz axemen. His collaboration on Ror Miles' Heaven, a duet album released last month, is utterly beautiful: without hyperbole I can say that if my last moments or earth are like the music on that record, I'll know I did something right.

The problem here is with Cautious Bill, who spends hours in the studio recording and overdubbing his tracks. The Ron Miles album, and albums like Nashville (supervised by hard-nosed producer Wayne Horvitz), capture performances live in the studio with minimal editing and overdubbing: they have the improvised feel of a conversation, the sense that someone caught a moment that we're lucky to have. Under Lee Townsend, who produced The Willies and most of Frisell's other recent albums, the pieces sound overplanned. Frisell treats the pieces carefully and often reverently, forgetting to let them breathe. The overdubs add color to the album (for example, Danny Barnes' addition of pump organ to several tracks), but the spontaneity is lost.

With the bluegrass standards that make up half of this album, the successes make the merely competent songs sound even worse. For every hot track like "Cluck Old Hen," with Barnes' manic runs and Frisell's gritty solo, there's a cover like "Blackberry Blossom" that's merely pretty (the extra loops from Frisell's delay pedal are colorful but unnecessary). "Goodnight, Irene" begins with a delicate improvised section but settles into a plucky but conservative reading. The slowed-down performance of "John Hardy" is a highlight; it explores a melody that modern players speed to a blur, and Barnes' extremely delicate solo is like drops of rain at an autumn funeral. But Frisell plays Hank Williams' "Cold, Cold Heart" with the eager faithfulness of a grade schooler reciting "Casey at the Bat."

Frisell introduces some good originals - particularly "Everybody Loves Everybody" and "If I Could I Surely Would" - but even here, the methodical studio versions are outshone by live recordings that have surfaced from some of the Willies performances. Their concert ir early 2000 at the Barbican in London has it all over this album: the BBC captured Eyvind Kang playing with the band, and his solo on "My Buffalo Girl" (from Good Man, Happy Dog) leaps out of the song, buys everyone dinner, has a few beers and gets laid before slinking back to restate the melody. And when Ghost Town's "Big Bob" segues into "If I Could I Surely Would," the latter tune (buoyed by noisy flourishes and a breezy pace) sounds much more like it's riding into the sunset than the immaculately constructed studio version.

Nonesuch takes a coffeetable-book approach to their releases, favoring immaculately produced studio products: they may never release the Barbican show, or any other live recording from Frisell. In its absence, The Willies is servicable, but it isn't the shit-kicking great time that it should be. It makes Frisell seem like the guy at the party who's scared to get drunk and break the host's furniture; and we know he has more bluegrass in him thar that.

Chris Dahlen - June 9 2002
pitchfork.com




Echoing his 1995 release, Nashville, Bill Frisell's The Willies revisits the auburn sounds of American roots music. Although he has dipped into folk music in prior efforts, these songs follow the traditional mode even more faithfully than any of his previous releases, with only minor shifts into his familiar dissonant explorations. Assisted by Danny Barnes (Bad Livers) on banjo and guitar and bassist Keith Lowe (Fiona Apple, Wayne Horvitz & Zony Mash), Frisell's quirky tonalities and sweeping soundscapes still pervade each track, but the disquieting surges found on releases like The Bill Frisell Quartet and Gone, Just Like a Train are relatively reigned in. This in no way means that The Willies sounds anything like Hot Rize or New Grass Revival - it is most certainly a Bill Frisell album; dark and mysterious, eerily beautiful, richly textured and layered - just sort of a kinder, gentler Bill Frisell album. Highlights include the banjo-driven Carter Family standard "Single Girl, Married Girl" and the group's stark rendition of "Sugar Baby," a song usually associated with the similarly haunting Dock Boggs. Anyone familiar with the guitarist's style will understand his choices in recording these timeworn love songs and murder ballads, and traditional folk aficionados will be intrigued to hear their old favorites in this new environment.

Zac Johnson - All Music Guide



His collaborations with John Zorn, Marc Johnson, and Paul Motian have shown that guitarist Bill Frisell is no stranger to the bustle and grind of rock and bebop, but on The Willies he again prefers a gentle ramble through the byways of American folk. Joined by Danny Barnes (Bad Livers) on banjo, guitar, bass harmonica, and pump organ, and Keith Lowe on bass, Frisell wanders dreamily through a mixture of bluegrass standards and originals. The pace hovers around a stroll and the rhythms, melodies, and harmonies are generally true to the idiom. Frisell's longstanding affinity with jazz may perhaps be deduced by the occasionally dark harmonic undertow, a suggestion that all may not be well down on the farm. Those with a taste for Ry Cooder's glowering 1985 soundtrack to Paris, Texas may find happiness with The Willies.

Mark Gilbert - Amazon.com



The Willies is the 15th album by Bill Frisell to be released on the Elektra Nonesuch label. It was released in 2002 and features performances by Frisell, Danny Barnes and Keith Lowe. The Allmusic review by Zac Johnson awarded the album 3,5 stars stating "Anyone familiar with the guitarist's style will understand his choices in recording these timeworn love songs and murder ballads, and traditional folk aficionados will be intrigued to hear their old favorites in this new environment.".

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