1993 · Album
Have a Little Faith
Recorded 1992 · Elektra Nonesuch · Personnel: Bill Frisell (guitar), Don Byron (clarinet), Kermit Driscoll (bass), Guy Klucevsek (accordion), Joey Baron (drums)
Bill Frisell Learns America Again
One of the most inventive recordings of the 1990s, drawing from American classical and popular music.
Have a Little Faith finds Bill Frisell stepping back from pure jazz abstraction to examine the material that built American music. Working with Don Byron on clarinet, Kermit Driscoll on bass, Guy Klucevsek on accordion, and Joey Baron on drums, Frisell assembled players who could move fluidly between idioms—folk, classical, hymnal, popular song. The session itself became an act of recovery, treating old Americana not as nostalgia but as living language. Frisell's guitar sits differently here, sometimes as orchestrator, sometimes as accompanist, sometimes stepping aside entirely to let Byron's clarinet carry a melody that might have come from a New Orleans street or a Midwestern parlor.
By this point in his career, Frisell had already proved himself comfortable in many settings. But this album feels less like synthesis and more like genuine listening. The range is real—classical fragments sit next to popular tunes, hymns breathe next to ragtime figures—yet the record coheres because each player understands the weight of what they're touching. This is not scholarly arrangement; it's musicians who respect these sources and know how to inhabit them without pretense.
Both the Penguin Guide to Jazz and AllMusic reviewer Scott Yanow recognized something essential here. The Penguin Guide called it a marvelous examination of Americana, and Yanow's assessment—that this should delight listeners across genres—proved accurate. For a Frisell listener, this stands as one of his strongest records and a good entry point if you want to hear him in conversation with something older and wider than jazz alone.
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