Bill Frisell's "The Disfarmer Project"

Fresh off his triumphant Cityfolk appearance on St. Patrick’s Day, guitarist Bill Frisell rolled into the Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts in Davis, California (near where I live in Sacramento), April 4 for a concert performance of Frisell’s The Disfarmer Project: Musical Portraits from Heber Springs. Frisell’s co-conspirators for the evening were Viktor Krauss (bass), Jenny Scheinman (violin, mandolin) and the great Greg Leisz (pedal steel guitar, dobro, mandolin).

Co-commissioned by the Wexner Center at Ohio State University, Musical Portraits from Heber Springs was “inspired” by the life work of small-town portrait photographer Mike Disfarmer, who lived and worked in Heber Springs, Arkansas, from 1917 until his death in the 1950s. Frisell’s work is meant to evoke life in Heber Springs during that period, aided by the projected photos of Disfarmer, which, frankly, became a distraction after just a few minutes.

Other than an inside-out version of the old fiddle tune “Arkansas Traveler,” the music was not as traditionally oriented as I expected it to be, but the quartet’s playing was never less than enjoyable and quite frequently transcendent. Some of the music resembled film scoring and was rather atmospheric, some was pure noise and guitar skronk (Frisell gleefully stomping his array of distortion and effects boxes) and some flat-out rocked. The most musically satisfying moments came when the quartet dug in and powered through actual songs—“That’s All Right, Mama,” and the Hank Williams classics “Lovesick Blues” and “I Can’t Help It (If I’m Still in Love with You).”

The story of the eccentric Disfarmer and his photos is beyond the scope of this short piece (follow the Disfarmer link above and click on 'Disfarmer Story'), but I think the concert was best appreciated as an evening of Bill Frisell and friends rather than a conceptual work about Heber Springs. I’ve looked at quite a few Disfarmer photos in the last several weeks, and I like them a lot, but never really felt a connection to them during the concert. Some information during the concert might have helped, but Frisell is a man of very few words, speaking only to introduce the musicians at the very beginning and the very end.

A fifth member of the Frisell team also made a significant contribution to the evening—Frisell’s longtime sound engineer Claudia Engelhart, who did a superb job of mixing and mic-ing the instruments, providing what was easily the best sound I’ve heard at the seven-year-old Mondavi Center, a beautiful state-of-the-art hall but an acoustical challenge for amplified music.

The grim, unsmiling faces in the Disfarmer pictures suggest that maybe Heber Springs wasn’t the happiest place in the world—or maybe those folks have just heard that their family photos are currently selling for tens of thousands of dollars on the New York art market. But Bill Frisell’s The Disfarmer Project: Musical Portraits from Heber Springs didn’t really need the Disfarmer angle to please the audience of nearly 1,000. We came to hear some extraordinary guitar playing from one of this country’s most creative musicians, and we went home happy.