Customer Reviews

This Land

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
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Let me start off by saying that if you are thinking about purchasing this album get the album "Have A Little Faith" first. What he plays on this album makes alot more sense to me thanks in part by me buying "Have A Little Faith."

Bill's group for this 1994 recording are the following musicians:

Joey Baron - drums

Curtis Fowlkes - trombone

Don Byron - clarinet and bass clarinet

Kermit Driscoll - bass

Bill Drewes - alto saxophone

All of these musicians help Bill create one his most memorable albums to date.

The guitar playing is very typical Bill Frisell. Unusual chord voicings, open stringed passages with volume swells, microtonal bends, and hip melodic phrasing that'll always grab your attention.

The music is a cross between bebop, heartland jazz, blues, country, and maybe some classical (e. g. the couterpoint of songs like "Unscientific Americans" and "Resistor"). This album really transcends genres. It can only be described as a Bill Frisell album. He breaks barriers and cliches and continues to amaze his peers and his fans with his chameleon-like musical personality.

Some of my highlights are "Strange Meeting" (originally from the 1986 ECM album "Rambler) "Jimmy Carter Part 1 and 2" (which appear later on the 2002 Nonesuch release "Blues Dream"), "This Land", "Is It Sweet?," and "Julius Hemphill."

All in all, this is a great album. Anyone who's a fan of Bill Frisell should really try to buy this album.

If you are familiar with Bill Frisell's work, you will know what I mean by "mixed bag". This album has Frisell's signature 'jazz with a slight country twang' tone, plus everything from latin to rag to rock to free improv. The ensemble is fantastic, based around Frisell's regular trio of the time, Joey Baron on drums and Kermit Driscoll on bass. He augments this with clarinettist Don Byron, alto saxophonist Billy Drewes and trombonist Curtis Fowlkes. All in all an excellent work, highlights including Frisell standards "Rag", "Amarillo Barbados" and "Resistor".

This set is quite playful, show Frisell's love of oddball cartoons. I've never been sure but I asume the title "Unscentific Americans" refers to the work of Roz Chast. many tunes are quite playful in a strange way, but there is often a tension in this music that seems like its going to just burst out but never does. Checkout Frisell's solos on Is it Sweet? and Jimmy Carter pt 2 for examples. An interesting album that's not quite as "easy" as his more recent work.

I've always been a fan of Frisell, from his Naked City days and work with Paul Motian. After the shock of his previous "Have a little faith" album, where he does covers of music by people as varied as Madonna, Bob Dylan, and Douglas Copeland, this CD of originals stroke me as fair on first listen. It has since grown on me to be one of my all time favorite records. The quiet intensity of this music that mixes flavors of blues, bluegrass, country and jazz into a strong creative improvisational framework is simply one of the most gripping experiences I ever felt.

in this work, Frisell just shows his qualities in evocating strange and even amtmoStrange meeting is fo me one of the nicest tracks of the jazz history