Bill Frisell’s Disfarmer Project Comes to the Flynn

Grammy-winning guitarist and composer Bill Frisell, along with his newly formed trio — steel guitarist Greg Leisz, violinist Jenny Scheinman, and bassist Viktor Krauss — paid tribute to Mike Disfarmer’s black-and-white photographic work on the evening of Wednesday, March 5. The quartet played on the Flynn Main Stage between two approximately six-foot-high, four-foot-wide screens, which were broken up into quarters. As the group played an electric-acoustic mix of folk, rock, blues, and even avant-garde jazz, Disfarmer’s so called “penny portraits” (black-and-white portraits of residents from the rural town of Herber Springs, Arkansas taken between 1939 and 1945), were projected onto the screens.

Often, to show greater detail, perhaps to those audience members in the back of the theatre, the photographs were shown in one quarter and then magnified to show a close-up of a face or detail of clothing. The portraits consisted of mothers or fathers holding their children, couples, whole families, a single child or a trio of friends or siblings, wearing what was probably their Sunday best. All photographs featured the individuals standing or sitting against a simple, black, no-frills background, occasionally with a chair or table present.

The tone set by the quartet was often somber and contemplative. It seemed as if the compositions were intended to act as an atmospheric landscape echoing the connotation of the visual material: raw, intimate, nostalgic, and at many times bittersweet. Though the music may have been at times somnambulant - even eerie - it often would build up intensity only to explode into blissful, sometimes raucous and repetitive improvisations by Frisell or Scheinman, who were both aided by the use of distortion and loops. Moments like those, common in Frisell’s playing, were well worth the wait and really demonstrated the range of styles included in the program.