History in the making

No more so than in Frisell's version of the Sam Cooke soul classic A Change Is Gonna Come, an anthem of fire and hope framed around a surging tenor saxaphone performance by Greg Tardy, who blows with a blooming authority throughout.

At every juncture of his recorded life in jazz, Frisell has brought into his canon an extraordinary divergent spectrum of Americana. In his 1993 album Have a Little Faith, for example, he includes Bob Dylan, Sosa, Madonna, Muddy Waters, Aaron Copland and Charles Ives.

In History, Mystery, there is another US concoction, with tunes by Thelonious Monk and Lee Konitz. African blood also flows in Boubacar Traoré's Baba Orame.

Frisell's albums since 1990 have seen him playing in many formats, including trio, quartet, sextet, octet and solo, but, on History, Mystery, he employs a unique ensemble with viola, violin, cello, bass and drums, plus the occasional addition of two horns - Tardy's tenor or clarinet and Ron Mile's cornet.

The album combines some very short pieces, virtual fragments, and some much longer tracks, some of their themes repeated in different times and speeds. But, throughout, there is a subliminal and heartfelt blues sound, the contradictory timbre of a crying guitar, as if the US musical reality is steepened in the shades of the elegiac accompanying the optimistic.

It is expressed with brilliance within the dancing strings of Eyvina Kang's viola, Jenny Scheinman's violin, Hank Roberts's cello, Tony Scherr's bass, Frisell's lightweight notes and Kenny Wollesen's bouncing drums all the way through Monk's Jackie-ing.

One of the longer tracks is Frissell's evocation of his birthplace Waltz For Baltimore, a sonic description of a place of dwellings in, another time, redolent of the black and white childhood isolation of the Walker Evans photographs which illustrate the album's sleeve.

Tardy's tenor wails out a lonesome commentary on a past era known only in word, note image and memory, while the battery of garrulous strings frantically converses all around him.

One of the Evans photographs shows a fair-headed boy sucking his fingers, sitting alone in front of a fairground booth advertising the "mystery of birth" and staring into the camera. During the album's opening track Imagination, the sound and the image strangely elide into a unity which is essentially of the US.

This is followed by the string ensemble pacing through the stepping melody of Probability Cloud, followed immediately but separately by the same tune played in a completely different, more anguished way by Frisell's solo guitar, as if each experience carries both perspective and counter-perspective.

Another double version comes within the tune Struggle. In the first part, Frisell twangs out the calling theme as if he were the inheritor of Duane Eddy, while Wolleson pounds and the violin and viola whine beside him. Half an hour onwards in the recording arrives Struggle Part 2. The string ensemble takes over the theme in call and response, with Frisell's guitar this time offering the answers and a series of complex note-utterances as a coda.

History, Mystery is racked with such reversals and ambivalences. The struggle of a man and musician striving to understand and articulate the meanings of his history, personally, artistically and politically.