Big Sur album cover
Big Sur

Bill Frisell

2013
Okeh

This is not exactly a jazz album. Bill Frisell composed the music while staying on a ranch in Big Sur, and performed it for the first time at the 2012 Monterey Jazz festival. The 19-part suite is written for a quintet of guitar, violin, viola, cello, and drums (he’s reunited here with cellist Hank Roberts, who played on some of Frisell’s earliest solo albums), and it’s basically designed as program music — intended to convey the beauty, expanse, and fragility of that beautiful region of California. It does so exquisitely, and sometimes sadly.

Rick Anderson

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