Tickets on sale now for Bill Frisell’s 75th Birthday Celebration

The guitarist and composer Bill Frisell — a “mild-mannered maverick [who] has made a colossal impact,” per The New Yorker — likes to remember a dream he had that transformed the way he thinks about music and his instrument. It occurred more than three decades ago, but Frisell can recall it today as if he just snapped awake, roused by a mix of fright and awe.

In the dream, Frisell enters a darkened building, traverses a stairwell and finds himself in a breathtaking library surrounded by stacks of leather-bound volumes and antiquities. At the center of the room is a table, and seated around the table are several monk-like figures in hoods. They seem forbidding at first, but quickly reveal themselves as warm and welcoming. “We want to show you what things really are,” they say. “First, we’d like to show you what colors really look like.”

Frisell narrates: “So they open this little box and take out these small blocks. They point to one and say, ‘This is what red looks like.’ And it’s the most intense, beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. Then they say, ‘We know you’re a musician, so we’d like you to hear what real music sounds like.’ It felt like some sort of tube was going into my forehead and moving around, and it was the most incredible sound I’d ever heard. Nino Rota, Thelonious Monk, Sonny Rollins, Charles Ives, Jimi Hendrix, Hank Williams, Andrés Segovia, Robert Johnson — all this music I love, but all the parts were crystal clear. And then I woke up…”