The only thing unidentifiable about Frisell's sound is what category to put it in. 'Miles, Thelonious Monk, Sonny Rollins - any musician who I love - part of the deal is they would have an instantly identifiable sound.' 'The people I admired growing up, every one had their own individual style,' says Frisell. He seems to know spaces between the frets that nobody else has found. Frisell can be calm one minute and then launch into distorted histrionics. It can vary from song to song, but Frisell's guitar conjures unpredictable dreamscapes of chord bursts, harmonics, twangs, and notes bent out of tune for a delicious nanosecond. Meet Bill Frisell.ĭespite the daunting challenge of standing out from his contemporaries and the titans of the past, Frisell has quietly expanded the vocabulary of the guitar, establishing his own sound in the process. In the jazz genre alone, guitarists run the gamut from Wes Montgomery's trademark octaves to Pat Metheny's liquid sound, and giants like Charlie Christian, Grant Green, and Joe Pass carved out their own niches.īut if you think you've heard just about everything that can be done with a guitar, forget about it.

From three-chord punks to virtuosos like Jimi Hendrix and Julian Bream, untold millions have played this humble, stringed wooden box and all of its permutations.

T would be difficult to come up with an instrument more popular in the Western world over the last half century than the guitar.

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