Bill Frisell story with Eberhard Webber: Fluid Rustle

[N_Singh]

There was a survey on a jazz guitar board of the favorite Bill Frisell album. A player whom I respect mentioned: "Fluid Rustle, as a young sideman with Eberhard Weber."

Why? He explained further: "Those recordings including In Line capture Bill's amazing voice and musical character finding its sound in pure spacious discovery. This was the stuff that literally changed the worlds of anyone I knew who heard Bill as he was discovering his audience."


An interesting anecdote from this musician on the record and asking Frisell about it: "When In Line came out, it was impossible to find. I'd see Bill pretty regularly, he played with anyone and everyone in those days. I asked him how I could get a copy. The next time I saw him he told me he bought me a copy. He had to BUY his own record because they were so hard to get. It's a treasure, for the artwork, for the music, for the time."


Time to go track this record down. "Fluid Rustle". ECM. 1979.

[nosebone]

Fluid Rustle is my favorite Eberhard recording.
Those eerie female vox get me every time.
I'll have to revisit again with Bill in mind.....

[FrippWire]

I distinctly remember special ordering a copy of In Line from the record store where I worked and it took forever to arrive. I too love Fluid Rustle for a whole host of reasons; Eberhard's playing, Bill's playing, the great compositions, the female vocals.

Further to Bill Frisell, I recently bought a small vinyl collection from a local Jazz guitarist who's retiring to Florida. He knew Frisell back in the day. Somehow he wound up with one of Bill's Grant Green LP's, it was in the batch of LP's I bought off the guy.

[Troopers For Sound]

Yes, Fluid Rustle is amazing, and those vocal arrangements pretty staggering! I'd also read that In Line was a bit of a struggle to record and had to be returned to after the initial sessions didn't produce as much music as Manfred and Bill had hoped. My favourite work from Bill in this period is probably on some of Paul Motian's albums around the early 80s.

Matt.

[wideopenears]

Love Fluid Rustle. And yeah, those vocals are just......beautiful.

The thing that really turned me on to Bill was the first Bass Desires record, though. Those two records are in my top ten....

[jkelman]

Fluid Rustle, which I bought when it came out as an already confirmed Weber (and Burton) fan, is one I remember so well. There was this new guitarist (to me) named Bill Frisell and, while I found his playing somewhat tentative on the record, I just knew there was more to this guy and he'd be worth keeping an eye on.

In my 2011 interview, Bill Frisell: The ECM Years (actually an interview I'd conducted with Bill in 2001 for another project that never materialized, so when I was doing a new interview with him - Bill Frisell: Ramping It Up - I went back to the 2001 interview, and realized there was plenty of good stuff there, so prepped it and ran the two back-to-back on consecutive days.

Here's the excerpt from the interview that talks about Eberhard and Fluid Rustle. It's so revealing of Bill's personality that, even then (in 2001), this is how he remembered things:

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"Mike Gibbs had a relationship with Gary Burton, and a lot of people that were on ECM were associated with Mike, for whom he had written music. So, after I got out of Berklee, I went and lived in Belgium for a year, and this is where I started to write my own music, and tried to find my own voice. Soon after I got to Belgium, in 1978, I get a call from Mike Gibbs, who had a tour of England with his own big band, and his regular guitarist, Philip Catherine, wasn't able to do the tour. I had played in Mike's band at school, so I knew the music, so he called me and asked me if I could do his tour. There were a lot of British musicians in the band, like [drummer] John Marshall and [trumpeter] Kenny Wheeler and [saxophonist] Charlie Mariano. Eberhard Weber was playing bass, so I was kind of thrown in with a lot of the guys I had been listening to already.

"It was just an incredible opportunity for me to be able to play with all these guys," Frisell concludes. "So, during that tour, there was a little area every night where Mike Gibbs let Eberhard and me play some free improv, and it really felt great; it felt like we were connecting—there'd be moments where it lifted off, with just two of us playing. This was in October or something, of 1978, and Eberhard had this recording coming up with Gary Burton that was going to be Fluid Rustle. Man, I couldn't believe it; I had done a couple little recordings in Belgium, but nothing that was a big recording. That was how I met Manfred Eicher, ECM label head/producer] the first time, and I think I was so terrified of the whole thing, I didn't know what I was doing. Even traveling and staying in the hotel, I didn't know what to do; I didn't even know how you checked into a hotel or anything. And I wasn't able to get much going; I was pretty inhibited during that recording."

Listening back to Fluid Rustle, it's clear that Frisell's performance on his first major recording was marred by a certain tentativeness. Still, what's most remarkable about the record—one that, over time, has emerged as one of Weber's most memorable recordings—is its sublime combination of vibes, guitar and voice, soaring to dramatic peaks while remaining filled with the subtlety, nuance and transparency that had become touchstones for ECM. That Frisell was young and green, among a group of far more seasoned players, was largely obvious only to the guitarist. "I didn't think I had made any kind of impression at all on Manfred," Frisell says. "He was just trying to get me to do something, you know, and he tried to get more sound. I was too freaked out to do anything. I don't think I ruined the record or anything, but I don't think I made a very big splash with anybody. So, I stayed in Belgium for a little while longer and I stayed in contact with Eberhard, and then I moved to New York; that would be 1979."

And that seemed to be it, as far as recording for ECM went: one record, and a feeling that he'd not made any kind of impression. "I was struggling along; nothing was happening," says Frisell. "I was playing weddings, and jam sessions with guys I knew from Boston. Every once in a while, through Mike Gibbs, there was a gig. There I met other ECM people—Bob Moses the drummer and [bassist] Steve Swallow. So I start to do a few things—like, Bob would call for gigs, and then I met [saxophonists] Julius Hemphill and Jim Pepper, and other people I later played with more; but there were a couple years where things were discouraging. But at the same time, I was getting a little stronger with my own voice, so somewhere in there, a lot of things happened at once. I made this solo tape—just a little cassette that was myself, overdubbed—and, without thinking anything would come of it, I sent it to Eberhard and Manfred, and so that went off into the mail.

"But then I got a call, one of the most important calls I ever got, at the lowest point of my career," Frisell continues. "[Drummer] Paul Motian called, another ECM person. I was rehearsing with Paul, and I sent this tape off, and that tape kinda got Eberhard more fired up about me; it kinda rekindled his interest in me. And he called me to do some duet gigs in Europe—again, totally improvised stuff—and I went over there. And this was when I was also playing with Paul: we played six or seven gigs—the quintet with [saxophonists] Billy Drewes and Joe Lovano, and [bassist] Ed Schuller—and did the album Psalm (ECM, 1982). That was, for me, the beginning of how Manfred and I connected.

"For me, Paul is one of the most important relationships I've ever had," Frisell continues. "He's not like my father, but almost. He's the guy, for me, where I get to do everything; he let me feel as if I was coming up with the stuff. It wouldn't have happened if it wasn't for him. We're still playing, and it feels like the first time we've played every time we play. I can't say enough about him.

"So I spent almost nine or ten months rehearsing with Paul before we ever did a gig; we did this in early in '81," says Frisell. "I did the duo concerts with Eberhard, and then I get a call from [bassist] Arild Andersen, out of the blue, because Manfred, through Eberhard, was told to check me out again. Arild had this gig in Molde at the end of the summer, and Manfred said [to Andersen], 'You should check out this guy Bill Frisell.' So, out of the blue, Arild called me. So, I went there in August of '81, and when I get to Arild's, my mind was being slowly blown, because I was playing with Paul, and then Arild called, and I go do that!

"Then I get to Arild's house, and we rehearsed a little bit, and he liked it; it was good," Frisell concludes. "Then the phone rang, and it was Manfred, to whom I hadn't talked to in three years. Manfred talked to Arild, asked how it was going, and he said, 'It's going great.' So Manfred gets on the phone and asks for me to do a solo recording, and I thought, 'Jesus Christ, this is insane.' There were so many things happening suddenly. That was August, and a couple months later we did a long European tour with Paul, when we recorded Psalm at the end, and before that tour, Eberhard had talked to [saxophonist] Jan Garbarek about me. So it was December, 1981 that I recorded Psalm with Paul. Then I flew from Munich to Stuttgart to Oslo, and met Jan and recorded Paths, Prints (ECM, 1982). And, at that point, things were clicking with Manfred; he was excited about my playing. My confidence level was going up and I was playing strong then."

After the tentativeness of Fluid Rustle, the release of Psalm, Paths, Prints, Weber's Later That Evening and Andersen's Molde Concert (ECM), all within months of each other in 1982, was as strong a quadruple punch as any guitarist has made in the past three decades. All became classic albums for their leaders, and Frisell's idiosyncratic, texturally expansive playing was the common thread that united them all. By this time, it was clear that Frisell could take any context and make it his own, with a distinctive harmonic language capable of reinventing anything he touched into something unmistakable, unfailingly recognizable as his.
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Amazing story, I think.
Best!
John

[nosebone]

Thanks John, that was informative.

The first time I heard Bill was in the early 80s with Stone Tiger, a power trio with Percy Jones and Mike Clark.

I just found a bootleg of one of their shows:
http://drfusion.blogspot.com/2009/05...l-frisell.html

[N_Singh]

Cool story, John! I used to be not very interested in ECM, but that was because I was ignorant of how diverse it actually was and is.