DISFARMER by Bill Frisell

Mike Disfarmer was an American photographer known for taking grittily realistic portraits of the residents of rural Arkansas in the early part of the 20th century.  Not exactly a likely subject for an instrumental concept album, you might think (who is?!), but Bill Frisell has never been a musician known for sticking to the standard template.  A friend reportedly came to him with the idea for creating a musical project based around the life of this unsung and slightly bizarre artist, and Frisell leapt at the chance to explore what he saw as a lost piece of arcane Americana.

Bill Frisell is nominally a jazz guitarist, but his recording output over the years has been so stylistically diverse (as Disfarmer aptly demonstrates) that any attempt to pin him down as belonging to one particular genre is doomed to end in failure.  In the same way, Disfarmer is nominally a country album.  The standard instrumentation of steel guitars, mandolin, violin etc is all present and correct, and Frisell's melodies (as evidenced by the reoccurring Disfarmer Theme) certainly conjure up mental images of rustic farmland and lonely nights on the range, but there's a good deal more going on here.  For a start, the music is full of flourishes that could only have come from a composer steeped in the jazz tradition; a slightly odd chord choice here, an hint of swing there.  Also, Frisell's affinity for guitar loops, as well as the repetitive, hypnotic phrases favoured by violinist Jenny Scheinman (especially on the tracks Focus and No One Gets In) are reminiscent of the sort of minimalism usually associated with the likes of Steve Reich and Terry Riley.  The music still wears its country influence on its sleeve, though, when the band embark on some instrumental covers of genre standards like That's Alright, Mama and Hank Williams' I Can't Help It.  The two sides of this album's sound are however married beautifully on the track Little Girl, in which Frisell's delicate electric guitar melody intermingles with Scheinman's violin ostinato and Greg Leisz's ethereal steel guitar playing, creating a heartbreakingly bittersweet tune which is so much greater than the sum of its parts.  

The absence of vocals, as well as the range of moods conjured by the music almost gives Disfarmer the feel of being a soundtrack to a film which doesn't exist.  I guess in some ways that's appropriate, as Frisell intended the album to be something like a soundtrack to Mike Disfarmer's life.  That said, the music never feels like it's missing anything, and though it is by turns both exultant and bleak, it's shot through with a sort of pastoral warmth which is never less than captivating.  Despite all the research that went into this project on the part of Frisell, it's likely that the more traditional parts of the album sound more like how we imagine early 20th century rural American music to have sounded than how it actually did.  But if the object of this recording was to evoke the feeling of a time and place now lost to us, and the life of a strange old man who somehow captured that feeling in his photographs, then maybe it's succeeded.