Bill Frisell Trio

Johnny D's Uptown Restaurant

Oct. 6

At first glance, Johnny D's Uptown Restaurant & Music Club might be aptly dubbed a modern-day Globe theater. The privileged sit in posh faux-leather booths dining on Cajun delicacies while the rest are left standing like corralled groundlings demarcated by signs that separate the standing from the sitting (so that the seated "patricians" are able to see without over-zealous standers-by encroaching on their line-of-sight). Or perhaps it is only when the guitarist Bill Frisell is playing that this cozy Davis Square establishment deserves such a comparison--the manager assures me that the place is usually not as crowded.

Frisell is one of the most innovative guitarists of our times and indeed one of the most amazing musicians alive today. Hyperbolic? Perhaps, but one reason why hyperbole exists is to describe the inexplicable. Indeed, it is quite difficult to characterize Frisell's music. Able to rework tunes from Dylan to Madonna to John Phillip Sousa as well as create a spatially expansive body of his own work, Frisell's music has been called the essence of "Americana." No doubt it is the sense of recognition, springing not so much from an elusive nostalgia as a surprisingly warm and engaging familiarity, that carries Frisell's music.

Being endowed with an overactive imagination and penchant towards over-dramatization might have led to an over-glorification of Frisell's one-night stint in Davis Square. But this is an untestable hypothesis. Frisell's music was perhaps the most pure that one could witness. Pure, but not random or delineated by mere aural frequencies; rather, one can be confident that whatever pleasure derived from Frisell's work is not contingent on some distorted desire for the eclectic or youthful psychological echoes. Even through the shadowy progressions of "Blues for Los Angeles," there was no ounce of offense. Frisell never tried to manipulate, although he, fiddling with knobs on his effects machine, was able to create sounds never heard before. Seeing Frisell was an experience not to be missed, sitting or standing.