Bill Frisell on genre

 In an interview posted at Grammy.com centered around his new album and other topics of the day, Bill Frisell touches on one of my recurring topics, and unsurprisingly, we are in total agreement.

 

On Harmony, you interpreted songs ranging from Pete Seeger to Lerner and Loewe. On Valentine, you draw from a similar well — there's a Hal David and Burt Bacharach song sharing space with a traditional hymn. To you, how does American folk music connect to the Great American Songbook?

I've always had a problem with how we put [them in separate categories]. I know we need words to describe things and we have to talk about the music, but when we put these labels and names on it it always has the effect of making it smaller than what it really is. To me, they're all part of one thing, whether it’s Beethoven or Monk or Robert Johnson or Jimi Hendrix or Morton Feldman. It's all music and it all fits together in my imagination.

Top 5 from October 16, 2013

Fort Tyron Park on the northern tip of Manhattan.

Get off the subway at 190^th street, learn from my mistake and take the elevator, although the neighborhood is nice, it's a long, steep, winding path up. A rocky, leafy, hilly park with many paths going up and down and around, with a spectacular view of the George Washington Bridge and the NJ Pallisades. All paths lead to the Cloisters, a fantastic little museum (now run by the Metropolitan) of medieval and renaissance and earlier art.

Annunciation Triptych (aka the Merode Altarpiece) by the workshop of Robert Campin, at the Cloisters

The reason we have abstract art today is because they were doing things like this in 1430. I remember talking about this painting in my college art history class. Amazing in its detail – the tiny angel delivering the cross to just conceived Jesus, the candle smoldering to life from the divine presence. The patron and his wife watching through the doorway on one side panel, Joseph working away not knowing what's about to hit him on the other. Tournai appears through the window rather than Nazareth. I leaned in far enough to set off the YOU'RE STANDING TOO CLOSE whistle and took an ipod photo after staring gob-smacked for about 15 minutes (as opposed to the guy who was walking through the galleries taking a picture of each object seemingly so he could look at it later at home on his computer).