Frisell suite captures Americana

What's more American than apple pie?

The list is short, maybe, but Saturday night's concert-collaboration between guitarist Bill Frisell and late photographer Mike Disfarmer sits atop it.

It's a fortuitous partnership between Frisell, an excessively humble jazz guitar genius, and Disfarmer, an ornery, once-obscure rural Arkansas portraitist who died in 1959.

Maybe the link itself is, at first glance, a bit obscure.

But each man is the sort of artist only America can produce-rugged but introverted, eccentrically individualistic and on the margins of their respective art forms but celebrated as among the greatest exponents of each.

Frisell is a polyglot who after an apprenticeship in the jazz avant-garde has created a distinctively American music interpolating bop, country, bluegrass, old-time folk and blues.

And Disfarmer, in a his corpus of haunting portraits taken in Heber Springs, Ark. from the 1930s until his death in 1959, captured a pivotal period in American history, when grizzled, methuselean Ozark farmers, bright-eyed toddlers in Sunday dresses and debonair, slick-haired young soldiers all made the pilgrimage to his studio.

"It's like going back in a time machine, you really get a feeling of that time and place, and there's something in the expressions on the people's faces," Frisell said of Disfarmer's photos. "He took them right at the moment when they weren't posing so you really see more what the people were really like. They weren't putting on-trying to act happy or sad. He really captured the time."

Helm's choice of Frisell to execute the project was based on more than just the guitarist's sound. Indeed, Frisell has a history of integrating visuals into his work. In the mid-'90s, he released two discs of imagined soundtracks to movies by silent-film star Buster Keaton; he has since collaborated with cartoonists Jim Woodring and "Far Side" creator Gary Larson, for whom he composed an accompaniment for "Tales from the Far Side" television specials. And in 2005, he created a suite of pieces inspired by abstract painter Gerhard Richter.

"Many times what a visual artist is trying to do-the motivation is really the same as what you try to do in music, so somehow they complement each other in a good way," Frisell said. "It pushes me more to find something in the music that I wouldn't have thought about if I hadn't been looking at the pictures. In a way it's restrictive, 'cause you have to fit into something. Maybe it'll force you into a corner and you have to find your way out some way."

The disarmingly shy Frisell might have sympathized with Disfarmer's reclusive tendencies. Born Mike Meyer, Disfarmer changed his name as an adult-apparently to dissociate from the farming society around him-and claimed he had been blown to the Meyer family by a tornado as a child. He was, as Frisell charitably describes him, "really intimidating as a person and not very friendly."

In conjunction with the concert, the Center for Documentary Studies is showing Disfarmer, an exhibit of some of his photographs, through April 6. Exhibitions Coordinator Courtney Reid-Eaton said there is a magic to the images that has posthumously made Disfarmer one of America's most respected portraitists.

"The people in the photographs seem to be very much themselves. They don't seem to be artificially posed and there's not a lot of busyness around them. In the pictures that have more than one person in them, there's a lot of interesting body language," she said. "I think it's a really an interesting document of a particular period in America, of a particular place at a particular time. There's something that makes you feel like you could touch their faces."

Frisell's band for the concert in Reynolds includes several longtime associates. New addition and bassist Viktor Krauss-brother of country star Allison-joins Leisz, violinist Jenny Scheinman and Frisell on the stand.

All three have appeared on multiple records with Frisell-especially Leisz, who Frisell calls "the other half of my brain."

"There was a record we made, Good Dog, Happy Man, and it was the first time we played together at all," Frisell said. "Usually I play with someone before I ask them to play on a record. It's pretty much-we've been playing ever since. He's so easy to play with. I don't have to really edit what I'm doing. We each can play really open and freely. It's weird."

Leisz, for his part, is someone almost every listener has heard-to say he's appeared with Beck, Wilco, Smashing Pumpkins and Joni Mitchell doesn't even constitute a partial discography.

The ace sideman said he expects this performance of the suite will be the "most grounded" yet, with a fresh round of rehearsals and the addition of Krauss to help bring out the power of the suite.

"It's evocative-I think Bill wants it to be evocative of a period of time, but there's a timelessness to those photographs, so that has to be realized in the music as well," Leisz said. "He's got original music, but interspersed with that he has music that's almost more from that time-swing, or more Ozark Mountain folk music, and that thread kind of keeps reminding you that you're talking about a period of time when these photos were taken."

The Bill Frisell Quartet performs Disfarmer Project: Musical Portraits from Heber Springs Saturday, March 1 in Reynolds Theater. Tickets are $5 for Duke students. See www.dukeperformances.org for more information.