Berne/Frisell and David Torn

By Gary Chapin

Tim Berne and Bill Frisell - Live in Someplace Nice (Screwgun, 2024) *****

I don’t often mess with “favorite album ever” talk, but when I do it almost always includes Tim Berne and Bill Frisell’s 1984 piece of magic, Theoretically. I don’t know if you would call it a masterpiece, since both were in early career mode, but there is something about that record that is so perfect, and so right—the sound, the balance, the intrigue, the suspense, the laughs—that I have never stopped loving it. AND, since it came out, I have never stopped wishing for more water from that same well. (Typical fanboi presumption!)

Live in Someplace Nice was recorded around the time they were recording Theoretically. It’s been gone over by David Torn, and has more kick-ass going for it than Theoretically did, which could be for any of three reasons. 1) Conscious choice of Tim and Bill. 2) Torn’s production. 3) Live recording, as opposed to studio. Frisell’s penchant for swells and sustain bring in a hint of ambience. Spaces to be written on and repetitive figures make the structure through which the brilliant improvisation navigates.

I’m trying to remember what it was like in 1984. A lot of us had fallen for this duo, but did anyone understand what a stunning abundance of talent existed here? Five stars in 2024.

 

David Torn - Sway the Palms (sr, 2024) *****

Torn, like Frisell, has an amazing ability to shape the envelope of the sound—through performance and production—it leaves one gasping for air. Torn offers these five tracks as part of a series, the rest of which I haven’t encountered (yet). The method in the madness, here, is that, in studio, Torn improvises the composition on guitar and real-time. In all cases, these compositions are meant to stand alone. In two cases, Torn invites a guest to “play with” the completed conversation not sweetening it, he says, but deepeningit.

Torn’s compositions feel like film soundtracks to me—the first thing of his I ever heard was the soundtrack for Lars and the Real Girl. He draws from the whole guitar template, steel acoustic to fully processed Frippery, but these are surface trappings (though interesting ones), set dressing for the scenes that unfold in my head as he evokes these stories. Tim Berne guests on the first track, and Gerald Cleaver on the third. On the title track, a 17 minute masterpiece, Torn improvises (as an overdub) a poem. The five tracks, though, come together with the coherence of a movement and hearing it all in one sitting leaves me basking, processing, and afterglowing. Also five stars.

More: https://davidmtorn.bandcamp.com/album/sway-the-palms