Bill Frisell - Blues Dream (2001)

01.Blues Dream
02.Ron Carter
03.Pretty Flowers Were Made For Blooming
04.Pretty Stars Were Made To Shine
05.Where Do We Go?
06.Like Dreamers Do (Part One)
07.Like Dreamers Do (Part Two)
08.Outlaws
09.What Do We Do?
10.Episode
11.Soul Merchant
12.Greg Leisz
13.The Tractor
14.Fifty Years
15.Slow Dance
16.Things Will Never Be The Same
17.Dream On
18.Blues Dream (Reprise).

BLUES DREAM is another in a series of guitarist Bill Frisell's painterly, roots-inflected explorations of American music. Here, Frisell is joined by a horn section which includes trumpeter Ron Miles and trombonist Curtis Fowlkes (of the Jazz Passengers), and the sound of hard brass in the mix crisply offsets his idiosyncratic, bent-note, impresssionistic techniques. Actually, the guitarist gets off more than a few rock-licks on the R&B jam "Ron Carter," a tribute to the bassist that, interestingly, sounds nothing like the elder jazzman's own music. Frisell returns to a more familiar pastures on "Pretty Flowers Were Made For Blooming" and its uptempo cousin, "Pretty Stars Were Made To Shine," which sound as though they were cribbed directly from the Carter Family Songbook. But, on "Like Dreamers Do (Pts. 1 & 2)," the presence of those horns prevents the leader from getting too lost in his Americana reveries. Consequently, BLUES DREAM is one of the strongest sounding solo outings of Bill Frisell's career.

Recorded at O'Henry Sound Studios, Burbank, California.

Personnel: Bill Frisell (acoustic & electric guitars, loops); Billy Drewes (alto saxophone); Ron Miles (trumpet); Curtis Fowlkes (trombone); Greg Leisz (lap steel, pedal steel, Scheerhorn resonator & National steel guitars, mandolin); David Piltch (bass); Kenny Wollesen (drums, percussion).