My review of Bill Frisell & Thomas Morgan's Epistrophy, today at All About Jazz.
When ECM Records released Small Town in 2017, beyond capturing the profound intimacy and musical ability to "finish each other's sentences" shared by the first recorded document of guitarist Bill Frisell and bassist Thomas Morgan in a duo setting, one of the biggest walk-aways was the hope that this would not be a one-off. Two years later, Epistrophy captures another 68 minutes (running literally 34 seconds longer than Small Town) of intimate interaction, culled from the same March, 2016 run at New York City's legendary Village Vanguard club. But if certain key markers remain the same between the two releases, Epistrophy not only expands upon the shared musical understanding and ability to get deep inside whatever music Frisell and Morgan choose to play; it also possesses its own distinct narrative, largely due to a selected set of nine tunes that possess some commonalities with Small Town, but some important differences as well.
Continuing, as a brief note articulates in Epistrophy's liners, "the story begun on Small Town," where this second set of music differs is in its sources. Yes, Frisell once again selects a song played when he was a member of Paul Motian's thirty-year trio with the guitarist and saxophonist Joe Lovano. Still, in contrast to the atmospheric title track from It Should've Happened a Long Time Ago (ECM, 1985) that opened Small Town, "Mumbo Jumbo," first heard on a later trio date with the drummer, Motian in Tokyo (JMT, 1992), is a far more oblique examination of this improv-driven sketch, also composed by Motian.
Frisell - who, with this duo, continues to largely eschew the greater arsenal of effects he so often employs - brings both ring modulation and reverse attack into the mix at various points during an eight minute exploration that fluidly moves in and out of time, as Morgan effortlessly shifts from brief periods of implicit and explicit swing to timeless, open-ended passages. Throughout, the pair feeds off of one another with the same mitochondrial connection heard, not just on Small Town, but on the guitarist's celebration of film music in the context of a larger ensemble, When You Wish Upon a Star (Okeh, 2016), Morgan's first recording with the guitarist.
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