Epistrophy is the second live album by guitarist Bill Frisell and double bassist Thomas Morgan. It comes from the same March 2016 run at the Village Vanguard in New York that produced their 2017 ECM duo debut, Small Town. The repertoire is again a personal songbook of jazz, Americana, pop and film music. Two Thelonious Monk pieces sit at its centre, and the playing rests on an empathy that makes melody and accompaniment hard to tell apart.
Both musicians knew Paul Motian and his music well, and Morgan also played and recorded with him. The concerts were recorded by Paul Zinman and James Farber. Farber mixed them at Avatar Studios in New York in December 2016, with the two players and producer Manfred Eicher. The cover painting, itself titled Epistrophy, is by Charles Cajori, a friend of Frisell's parents, who used to tell him about hearing Miles Davis and Monk at the Vanguard.
Morgan proposed two of the songs. All in Fun, by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II, had been in their book since their first set as a duo. Save the Last Dance for Me is introduced by Wildwood Flower, a long-time Frisell favourite. Motian's Mumbo Jumbo is the densest and most abstract piece, and Frisell has said that Morgan showed him things in it he had not realised were there. With John Barry's You Only Live Twice, as with Goldfinger on the earlier album, Frisell wanted to strip away the pop associations and reach the chords and melody. The Monk pair sets the funky, angular title piece against the ballad Pannonica, and the evening closes with Red River Valley and In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning.
Writing in DownBeat in June 2019, Tyran Grillo heard All in Fun take on a double meaning, since the two players "bring an unforced profundity to the occasion". In the Los Angeles Times, Chris Barton called the Barry tune the most unexpected pleasure, a theme that "has rarely been handled so gently." CJ Shearn of Jazz Views set the album beside Pat Metheny and Charlie Haden's Beyond the Missouri Sky.
This is the CD edition, ECM 2626, in a jewel case with a 12-page booklet, released on 12 April 2019.
