Bill Frisell, Beautiful Dreamer (Signed Edition)

A beautiful and long overdue portrait of one of America’s true living cultural treasures — Bill Frisell. Watson approaches his subject with deep respect and understanding, and through insightful prose, interviews and listening sessions, he deftly peels back the layers of the onion to reveal a complex and dedicated musician whose openness, loyalty, courage, vision, humility, lovingkindness, generosity, and remarkable ability to challenge himself again and again, has made him one of the most beloved and influential guitarists of all time. A brilliant book about a brilliant musician. If music was a religion Bill Frisell would be a Saint.

Philip Watson’s book on Bill Frisell is wonderful. It is a model of immaculate research. It is imaginatively structured and very well written, with real feeling and insight. And it captures exactly the Bill that I know.

Warm-hearted, collaborative, and discreet to the point of being almost ambient, Beautiful Dreamer manages to be the perfect companion-piece to the music of its subject.

Outlines the subject’s life in a series of scrupulous strokes and intimate interviews that are rare in such undertakings. The bonus here is that the life of the musician who played the guitar the way Miles Davis played the trumpet is enhanced by an 11-part chronological sequence of what Watson terms ‘Counterpoints’ . . . It’s an unusual biographical exercise, yet the responses highlight aspects of Frisell’s work that a non-musician would surely rarely (if ever) detect. The consequence of Watson’s sometimes tangential approach is a cool, casual victory.

[Watson's] writing balances unbridled passion and dispassionate research nearly as deftly as Mr. Frisell’s playing does sound and silence . . . compelling.

The biography is stuffed with musical encounters, so many that every couple of pages there’s an unheard Frisell recording for the reader to chase down.