The stalwart jazz guitarist Bill Frisell has been playing the downtown club Roulette since it began in 1978, when it was just founder Jim Staley hosting shows in his Tribeca loft apartment. Roulette, which Staley built to intentionally intermingle the avant garde new music movement with the jazz scene, has gone on to become a city institution, moving out of Staley's apartment and out of Manhattan to Brooklyn.
The year that Roulette was growing, Max Gordon, the promoter, author, and founder of the jazz landmark Village Vanguard died, and his wife Lorraine, took over the club, inviting Frisell to start exploring his now-iconic solo performances. Later in the 1980s, Frisell met Bill Morrison, who would become a wizard of archival filmmaking, but who was then washing dishes.
Morrison became the de facto archiver of the legendary club during this time, and began using Frisell's music in his films.The collaboration eventually evolved into a live, collaborative show, "Double Bill," which is making its New York debut on June 24 at Roulette's current home, at the YWCA building in Downtown Brooklyn. Morrison told me that while the show began with him cutting film to match Frisell's elastic improvisation, he's gone digital now, making the filmmaking improvisatory as well: "There's also a certain amount that I can play with this program I use, where I can introduce footage or newsreels that haven't found their place into other productions yet," he told me in an interview from Italy, where he plans to comb through archival Venetian footage. He says he's excited to use some footage from cameras he put on cat's collars. "They make incredible movies," he said.
I asked Morrison and Frisell (who was sitting on a park bench in California gawking at beautiful dogs) about the history of their collaboration, their meeting at the Village Vanguard in the early 1990s, and what the audience can expect from the Double Bill.
Hell Gate: I wanted to start by asking about the fundamentals of how your live collaboration works.
Frisell: It's been a long process. We met at the Village Vanguard—I was playing there and Bill was a dishwasher. I didn't even know he made films. He asked me if he could use some of my music for one of the films that he had done, and it's been a gradual evolution. It started with him using pre-existing music, and then there was this other film, "The Mesmerist", where he had used pre-existing music that I had recorded, but then that was the point where we actually started doing this live.
Morrison: I think what happened with "The Mesmerist" is that the New York Guitar Festival had said they would commission you to write new stuff, and I made the mistake of giving you a temp track that worked too well.
Frisell: Yeah, but then we used that as a blueprint for what we did live, but I played the music that he had used from a recording. So that was kind of the first entry into doing things live. And then "The Great Flood," that's where we really started from the ground up with an idea of putting together the film and music simultaneously, traveling together up and down the Mississippi River as I was writing the music and Bill was gathering the film.
Morrison: They booked a tour [in 2012] for Bill and his bandmates to go up and down the Mississippi River. And that would be sort of a writing residency as well as a tour. Then there was this added coincidence that the river was really high that spring and we were in a couple towns where people were really anxious that the levee wouldn't hold because it was as high as it had been since 1927, which was the flood that we made the film about.
Frisell: Soon after that it got more and more improvisational. "The Great Flood" had an element of that, where Bill could change the order of things or change the length of things, depending on what the band was playing. But then, eventually we started doing these things with just the two of us, where there's more and more freedom.
Morrison: I think it really stems from us having a lot of trust in each other at this point. You know that it's gonna work and so we just set up parameters where we can play.
Frisell: Yeah. And then to do it in Roulette… I love that room. The original Roulette was Jim Staley's apartment. It was his loft, and some of the very first gigs I ever did in New York were in that place, and some of the most amazing music I've ever heard, I heard in that room.
Bill M., what made you want to wash dishes at the Vanguard?
Morrison: I didn't want to wash dishes anywhere else, that's for sure. A lot of people have had that job. I believe [playwright] Sam Shepard had that job at one point. It's an amazing position to be in, because unlike the bartender who has to be at the bar, the doorman who has to be at the door, and the servers who have to work the floor, you're in the kitchen, which is the central nerve of the club. That's the office, and the dressing room, and the kitchen all combined in one. Bill and I became friends in that room.
I started bringing a Hi8 camera down, around 1994 and 1995. People were, at that point, used to me being there, and they trusted me. I started recording interactions between musicians that were happening in the kitchen. And in some ways they somehow channeled the same kind of energy that they had on stage. I was actually making decent money, believe it or not. And I was going there on my nights off, I couldn't stay away from the place. And to this day, I still visit the club once a month anyway, though I have to pay to get in now.
What was going on at the Vanguard at the time you guys met?
Frisell: That place for me is sort of sacred ground. I grew up in Denver, and the summer after I graduated from high school, my parents moved to New Jersey. And that summer was the first time I went to the Village Vanguard, 1969. Woodstock was happening, but I went to the Vanguard.
Back then, I never would have dreamt that I'd ever get to play in that room.I heard Sonny Rollins play in there, I heard Charles Mingus play in there, Lee Konitz, Dexter Gordon, Thad Jones, Mel Lewis. I never would have imagined that some years later I'd get to play there. Fast forward to the late 1980s, I got to play there because Jim Hall invited me to play with him. I just can't even imagine where I'd be without that place.
Morrison: There was a breaking down of these barriers between what was traditional jazz and new music, right?
Frisell: It was like a free-for-all. Max Gordon, the man that started the Vanguard in 1935, passed away right after I started playing there and Lorraine Gordon, his wife took over. I think her mind might have been a little more open. She was the one that talked Max into letting Thelonious Monk play there.
Morrison: She talked Alfred Lyon into recording Monk.
Frisell: She somehow took a liking to me and let me play there.
Morrison: She loved Bill.
Frisell: At that time, it seemed like the Vanguard really opened itself up to what was happening in that moment. And it's still doing that now.
Morrison: It was a wild time also in the early '90s because there was record label money behind these artists. So there were these nights that I was working that were really charged. There were people lining up down the block, with three sets sold out, and the last one begins at two in the morning. It was quite a scene. There was a renewed interest in jazz.
I'm going to pivot to asking about Roulette. What's the history of that institution and how did you relate to it at the time you guys met?
Frisell: It was pretty soon after Roulette started that I moved to New York. I guess the first things I did maybe were with John Zorn, or sort of this circle of people around Zorn. Tim Byrne, we played there often. Even before I had my own band or anything, I would play solo there. We had a band, Jim Staley and Ikue Mori, a trio. Jim is the guy that started the whole thing, he lived there, and he would put on these concerts.
What's the significance to this presentation that you guys are going to have at Roulette to you?
Morrison: Our friendship really began very organically, as did our collaborative partnership. And we've been working on it now for close to 30 years. This particular show, the Double Bill, we've probably done a half a dozen times, at various intimate venues around the country. You know, it's really sort of got its sea legs together now and we're ready to present it in a larger venue like this. We have our community that's behind us, supporting us, they're going to come out. And I just feel like it's sort of a celebration of this collaborative spirit.
Frisell: There's like this long, slow development of our friendship and how our relationship is reflected in the trust that's happening. It's something very intimate that we're doing. It's become more and more intimate. We can take more risks. We can take more chances and there's been trust there all along. If I'm playing in a group, that's a thing that hopefully comes through even more than what the song is or what the sound is or anything: If the audience can feel that connection that we're having with each other.
Morrison: You know, I started working with his music as a filmmaker because I thought that he stretched and condensed time in such an interesting way that I started using his music as a scratch track. But then I got really attached to it, so much so that I used his music without asking his permission. And I went to him and started to understand the whole thing about publishing and master rights. So I got a quick tutorial on that, but I'm greatly inspired by his use of time and melody. It's been a throughline throughout my entire creative life, and it's just great to have it manifested here because I think what I do visually oftentimes really reflects what he does sonically.
In addition to Roulette on the 24th, "Double Bill" is also playing at the Jamesport Meeting House on the North Fork on Wednesday the 26th. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
