Bill Frisell is more accustomed to moving forward than looking back. Over the past four decades, the guitarist has drifted between avant jazz and Americana (and a little doom metal, too), sounding like nobody else the whole time. But on his latest album, In My Dreams, recorded between live shows and the studio, the easygoing savant stops to assess his indefatigable career, still equipped with his signature experimentalism and his longstanding penchant for collaboration.
Frisell will turn 75 on March 18, midway through his current tour, and retrospection is a constant throughout In My Dreams. The record sits atop the coupling of two core groups that Frisell has worked with over the years: His bandmates here are Jenny Scheinmann (violin), Eyvind Kang (viola), and Hank Roberts (cello)—aka 858 Quartet, the guitarist’s go-to string section—and Thomas Morgan (bass) and Rudy Royston (drums). In some sense, In My Dreams is the musical equivalent of a conversation between friends at a birthday party. It’s sentimental, wry, curious, and highly synergistic: Even if the dialogue has its lulls, the silences never feel awkward.
The finespun rhythmic intuition of Morgan and Royston, who played with Frisell on 2020’s Valentine, and the richness of the string section, despite its small size, work together to ensure the record’s easy dynamism; both give freedom to Frisell’s playing, but also decenter him when necessary. On “Curtis” he hardly solos, on the misty-eyed “Hard Times” he goes completely chordal, and on “Never Too Late,” a standoff between an apprehensive string trio and talkative bass, he is practically inaudible, delicately washed away in the space between the players.
When Frisell does step forward, though, as on the album’s title track, it’s still as magical as ever. His playing is marked by a near-pianistic understanding of the textural and sonic potentials of the guitar, which he often accompanies with loops and effects. Frisell’s erudite scholarship of the fretboard—in college seminars, he stood out for his obsessive attention to scales and inversions—is combined with an acute awareness of the way a perfectly placed harmonic, bend, or burst of legato has the power to recontextualize an entire line.
“In My Dreams” begins with Frisell tentatively wading his way around the head before coolly dissonant arpeggio overdubs creep in. Although the strings are subservient here—bobbing behind the melody, or just playing it functionally—they retain their languor as Frisell mutates the line into jumpy rhythmic figures, or simply hits murky harmonics.
The group’s playing is even-handed—no mean feat in an ensemble with five string players, where overlapping instrumental ranges could make it easy for musicians to step on each other’s toes, or compositions to come off as messy. Even the album’s most challenging moments, like the skittered-out drums, atonal basslines, and artificial cello harmonics toward the end of “Again,” are articulated with a level of familiarity and consideration.
But this fluidity also comes down to the way In My Dreams was recorded. It was captured across several live shows in America at the beginning of 2025, where the musicians didn’t know their playing would form the basis for an album. Later, Frisell tweaked the tapes in the studio with the help of longtime producer Lee Townsend and engineer Adam Muñoz. The process polishes the gentle bonhomie that promises to transform even the smallest silences into celebrations. If you listen closely, you can almost hear the little nods and smiles between players; decades of friendship stashed inside every caesura.
