Speed Wizards Come, chopsmen go, but jazz slowhand Bill Frisell stands out as the most original electric guitarist to emerge in the past 20 years. Blessed with something less than the requisite methamphetamine fingers needed to wow the jocks, Frisell opted to become a digital dream weaver, with a subtle palette of legato inflections, pedal-steel swells, throttled blues cries and quasar blip noise-all animated by a stunning harmonic senibility. He has made a career out of the little gesture, finding those rhythmic cracks in time others leave behind. And no matter how wild things get, he always finds a lyric focus somewhere in the maelstrom, which is why he's become one of the most popular sideman in the new music (and the old.)
But somehow, he hasn't quite gotten his due as a leader and a composer. Is Tha You? won't change that, because he still refuses to identify himself with any one style of music; as a child of the 60's, he loves it all. Who else would attempt "Days of Wine and Roses" and "Chain of Fools" on the same side, let alone in one lifetime; the former aglow in shadowy voicings and spare teardrop counterpoint, the latter pitting a cat-scratch lead against a chor of overdubbed guitars, a la Les Paul? Elsewhere, his originals pit lyric and rhythumic elements against each other in quirky collages of sound, "No Man's Land" suggesting the Weather Report of "The Unknown Solider," while the charming "Rag" echoes both turn-of-the-century American dances and the great twentieth-century Spanish composers. On the title tune, Wayne Horvitz's keyboards, Joey Baron's drums and Dave Hofstra's tuba add color to Frisell's chamber-like arrangement, with its rich Southwestern imagery-,a kissing cousin to Bill Lawsell's orientalisms. "Half a Million" is a signature Frisell electric showpiece, each chord bathed in a pool of amniotic fluid, its country and Mexican themes shyly circling in and out of each other, even as the closing "Hope and Fear" and the dtring-band "Twenty Years" belie Frisell's need for digital gimmickry at all.
Is Tha You? is a very personal vision. tearing down stylistic barriers with delicacy and sudden bursts of emotion. Frisell the composer is every bit as formitable a figure as Frisell the sideman. Someday soon guitarists will find themselves drawn to his puissant restraint-Chip Stern
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