1992 · Album
More News for Lulu
Recorded Live, Paris and Basel, 1992 · Hathut Records · Personnel: Bill Frisell (guitar), John Zorn (alto saxophone), George Lewis (trombone)
Frisell Swinging Hard in Borrowed Standards
Three strong voices trading on hard bop tunes, live and unvarnished, with real stakes.
By 1992, Bill Frisell had already moved far beyond his early straightahead work. He was deep into soundtrack work, Americana explorations, and the kind of genre-crossing that made him harder to pin down. More News for Lulu More News for Lulu (1992) is a deliberate step backward—a return to post-bop fundamentals, playing bebop and hard bop standards with John Zorn on alto and George Lewis on trombone. It's not a detour. It's a test.
Live recordings from Paris and Basel catch all three players operating with real conviction on tunes by Kenny Dorham, Hank Mobley, and Freddie Redd. Frisell's guitar work here is lean and direct, built around single-note lines and blues phrasing rather than the orchestral textures he'd been developing elsewhere. There's no room for ambiguity in a trio. Lewis and Zorn keep him honest. The material demands swing, and they deliver it.
This is a sequel to News for Lulu, which means Frisell was willing to revisit the format. What matters is that he doesn't phone it in. The recording quality is warm but unglamorous—you hear fingers on strings, breath, the actual room. For listeners coming to Frisell from his more experimental work, this clarifies where his swing instincts live. For those who knew him as a straight-ahead player first, it's proof he never really left.
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