A string quartet at Ronnie Scott’s, the temple of roaring horn riffs, smoky tenor sax canoodlings and sizzling cymbal grooves? Bill Frisell brought in just such a jazz rare breed this week, featuring himself on electric guitar alongside violinist Jenny Scheinman, violist Eyvind Kang and cellist Hank Roberts. They intuitively segued between blues, rockabilly, bebop and avant-improv with barely so much as a prompting nod, and if this often delicate music might have had a tougher time on a rowdy Frith Street Saturday night, it held the Monday audience rapt.
They opened as if it were a free-improv gig, with the acoustic players bowing gently dissonant sweeps while Frisell pinged soft harmonics – a long state of suspended animation abruptly ended by a single humming tremolo chord, as if Duane Eddy had usurped the leader’s place. A chugging groove sprang up, for Kang to develop in slippery, sitar-like variations and the straighter-toned Scheinman in swerving long lines and barn-dance chords, before Woody Guthrie’s This Land Is Your Land glimmered and then vanished. Frisell’s quietly plucked solo introduction to Fats Waller’s Jitterbug Waltz became a clamour of arrhythmic pizzicato playing and bass-like improvised counterpoint from Roberts’ cello; a surprisingly respectful You Only Live Twice brought smiles; and Thelonious Monk’s Skippy fizzed with beboppish drive.
Roberts uncorked an improvisation of fast runs and biting chordwork on the second set’s guitar-blues opener before the group paid their respects to the 1960s music of Miles Davis and Wayne Shorter with elegiac slowness in place of the original’s edgy avant-swing. Scheinman transformed a jaunty folk theme with a beautiful Celtic-tinged violin break, and Kang stamped his more percussive, pitch-bending imprint on a rock-powered episode, before the country and western-style knees-up of the finale. Eclectic without being mannered, virtuosic without showing off, devoted to applying improvisation from many angles to tunes coming from many more, Bill Frisell’s Music for Strings ensemble is a unique delight.
• This review was amended on 26 October 2015. An earlier version referred to Bond theme From Russia With Love, rather than You Only Live Twice.
