#SPACE AGE MUSIC SERIES#

There's more than a hint of Hank Marvin's influence here and even more so on Joe Meek's cantering 'Telstar,' which sounds like the sister theme to the TV western series The High Chaparral.

Frisell's trademark loops add a personal seal. Frisell and Leisz ride in unison, embellishing the melody with sustain, peeling notes, crying slide, and reverberating shimmer and twang. Scherr's hypnotic two-note bass line forms the backbone of 'Pipeline,' The Chantay's grooving 1962 surfer hit. With Frisell, there's a time for stretching the boundaries and, as with Guitar in the Space Age, there's a time for plain-old having fun. However, if there's a suggestion that Frisell is getting a little nostalgic in the autumn of his years it's worth remembering that Frisell's two releases sandwiched between All We Are Saying and Guitar in the Space Age were the avant-garde solo guitar album Silent Comedy (Tzadik, 2013) and the contemporary chamber-meets-country suite Big Sur (Okeh, 2013). That album and Guitar in the Space Age feel in some ways like companion piecessonic sculptures hewn from similar source material. Here Frisell re-explores his musical rootsor perhaps joins the dotsonce again in the soulful company of Greg Leisz, Tony Scherr and Kenny Wollesen, who wove their collective charms on Frisell's John Lennon tribute All We Are Saying (Savoy Jazz, 2011). He was barely in his teens when Chicago blues, surf music and the era's alt-country that has so informed his playing first impacted. Growing up in Denver, Frisell was just eleven when Telstar made headlines as the first direct relay communications satellite to be launched into space. Sixty years on, in an age when the challenge is just to keep abreast of technological innovations it takes an effort to imagine the seismic shift that the electric guitar and space traveland television that brought such adventures into millions of homessignified for youngsters like Bill Frisell. As a musical revolution was evolving, so was a different type altogether -space exploration. Though prototype electric guitar first appeared in the early 1930s, the instrument only became a staple of popular music in the 1950s and 1960s.

Space age music