Commissions
Bill Frisell
Bill Frisell’s career as a guitarist and composer has spanned more than 40 years and many celebrated recordings, whose catalog has been cited by Downbeat as "the best recorded output of the decade." Recognized as one of America’s 21 most vital and productive performing artists, Frisell was named an inaugural Doris Duke Artist in 2012. He is also a recipient of grants from United States Artists, Meet the Composer among others. In 2016, he was a beneficiary of the first FreshGrass Composition commission to preserve and support innovative grassroots music. Upon San Francisco Jazz opening their doors in 2013, he served as one of their Resident Artistic Directors. Bill is the subject of a documentary film by director Emma Franz, entitled Bill Frisell: A Portrait, which examines his creative process in depth, as well as an extensive biography by Philip Watson, Beautiful Dreamer: The Guitarist Who Changed The Sound of American Music.
Composition Commission
Bill Frisell, our first Composition Commission recipient (2016), is a relentless explorer of American roots traditions, from jazz to blues to folk and beyond. He’s regarded by many as the most innovative guitarist in the world, so it was no surprise that he took our commission guidelines–to write a 30-40 minute piece of new music–and promptly turned them inside out and made them his own. Convening a brand new ensemble of frequent collaborators consisting of fiddler/vocalist Petra Haden, cellist Hank Roberts, and multi-instrumentalist Luke Bergman (all of whom he had worked with on different projects but none of whom had worked with one another), Frisell created a 90-minute concert that freely ranged across the American folk cannon, blending original material with eloquent and novel reimaginings of everything from Pete Seeger’s “Where Have All the Flowers Gone” to the early 19th Century traditional piece “Oh Shenandoah.” The results were achingly beautiful. Harmony premiered at the Strand Theater in San Francisco in November of 2016 and went on to tour the country, with the final performance at the 2017 FreshGrass Festival at MASS MoCA.