Event

ELLNORA: Bill Frisell’s Disfarmer Project: Musical Portraits from Heber Springs

FEATURING VIKTOR KRAUSS, GREG LEISZ, AND EYVIND KANG

Saturday, September 12, 2009, at 2pm | Colwell Playhouse

ELLNORA | The Guitar Festival | Unconventional influences from Aaron Copland to John Philip Sousa to Madonna have always held a keen pull for Bill Frisell. “Straddling the electronic ambiance and distortion of contemporary rock and the nuances of touch and harmonic sophistication usually associated with jazz,” Frisell has compiled more than 25 albums spanning progressive folk, country, and contemporary music (Musician).

Known for a quiet demeanor and ever-present humor, this superman with an axe has been tapped by Down Beat as Guitarist of the Year five times over since 1998, and SPIN calls him “the Clark Kent of the electric guitar. Soft-spoken and self-effacing in conversation, he apparently breathes in lungfuls of raw fire” before he “coaxes and slams” his guitar into “one of the biggest leaps of imagination since the Yardbirds and Jimi Hendrix” for “a succinct, seamless mesh” of sonic and melodic ideas.

Frisell’s Disfarmer Project sprouts from outsider artist Mike Disfarmer’s starkly intimate portraits taken in small-town Arkansas during the height of the Great Depression, the dramatic shifts during the war years, and the transformations of postwar prosperity. Frisell and his collaborators have fashioned the more than 3,000 photographs in the collection into the seeds of a musical composition sown in the traditional fiddle music of the Ozarks. This rustic suite—performed to haunting images illuminated like stained glass—captures the biting and delicate essence of one of America’s greatest portraitists.

This piece normally features Jenny Scheinman. Ms. Scheinman is expecting a child in early September, and Bill is delighted to have Eyvind Kang join the group for this engagement.

Go to the official ELLNORA web site
Corporate Power Train Engine:
Eastland Suites Hotel and Conference Center
Scanics

Corporate Power Train Sponsors:
WCIA 3
JSM Development

Patron Sponsor:
Anonymous

Corporate Gold Sponsor:
One Main Development

Patron Co-sponsors:
Frances and Marc Ansel
Jean Huddleston, Kelly Foster, and Paul Foster
A. Mark Neuman
Mary and George Perlstein
Carol and Ed Scharlau

Corporate Silver Sponsors:
Chief/Bauer Heating & Air Conditioning
Dean’s Graphic Division
Hendrick House
The Blind Man Hunter Douglas Gallery

Corporate Bronze Sponsors:
Bacca Cigar Company
Barham Benefit Group
Fluid Events LLC
Precision Graphics
Jeffrey Van Buren, Senior Vice President-Investments of Wells Fargo Advisors LLC, and Valerie Van Buren

Regional Grant:
Arts Midwest

Additional Support: Fluid Events, LLC