Bill Frisell to Play SOPAC, 1/22

Former Hoboken resident and guitarist, Bill Frisell, takes to the stage at the South Orange Performing Arts Center Thursday, January 22nd at 7:30PM to navigate audiences through the sounds of surf, blues, country, swing and rock. His performance, Guitar in the Space Age!, is a look back through decades of music with the perspective of an astronaut peering at the crystalline image of the planet earth through millions of miles of outer space. BillBoard magazine said it best when stated, "No one refracts age-old Americana through a cutting-edge prism with the warm-hearted, fleet-minded individuality of Frisell." Joining Frisell for this performance will be fellow guitar master Greg Leisz on electric and pedal steel guitars, and his trio partners Tony Scherr on bass and Kenny Wollesen on drums.

Frisell has spent an entire life perfecting his eclectic technique. His ensuing journey reads like a season off the television show The Amazing Race. From the Red Rocks of Colorado to the San Juan Islands off the coast of Washington state, from cities along the eastern seaboard to municipalities across Europe, he came of age at the foot of the Rocky Mountains, attending the concerts of Buffalo Springfield, Jimi Hendrix, Ravi Shankar and James Brown. As a clarinetist, he played at the Rose Bowl Parade with the All American High School Band but soon switched instruments and put all of his efforts into the guitar, not a bad choice considering the man's multiple Grammy Award nominations.

After completing his undergraduate work, he moved to Boston, home of the renowned Berklee College of Music, where he eventually met Pat Metheny, among others. Many gigs and wedding receptions later, Frisell moved to New York City, where no one can say he did not pay his dues. He recalls doing dirty jobs with other struggling musicians in New York City during those early days to make ends meet. One such instance involved cleaning the gooey, sometimes hardened caramel out of machinery in a candy factory after sampling an inordinate amount of "left-over" chocolate and nearly making himself sick.

Somewhere along the way, however, he graduated to being the musician Spin Magazine referred to as "the Clark Kent of the electric guitar." Admittedly a shy person, he has found freedom in the medium of live performance. "I like to have fun when I play and I like comedy - but it's not a conscious thing...there are all these things inside me that get out when I perform. It's like a real world...where I can do all the things I can't do in real life," quotes The Village Voice.

Prior to releasing Guitar in the Space Age with Okeh Records in 2014, most recently Frisell put out an avante-garde solo guitar album entitled Silent Comedy and before that the contemporary "chamber-meets-country" suite, Big Sur. But Space Age pulls Frisell's musical DNA all together with classics like Pete Seeger's "Turn, Turn, Turn," Ray Davies' "Waiting for You," and Merle Travis' "Cannonball Rag," not to mention Frisell originals, "The Shortest Day" and "Lift Off." So whether you like your electric guitar "oozing and enveloping" or "ripping and reverb-heavy," Guitar in the Space Age Thursday, January 22nd at 7:30 PM in South Orange is an event not to be missed. It promises to be a retrospective possible only through the eyes and fingers of guitar hero Bill Frisell, the Miles Davis of the six string idiom.