An amazingly exploratory performance that ties together a lost colleague, a fabled basement club, and some breathtaking improvisations.
Few musical situations are as intimate and rewarding as playing in a duo. All your thoughts and energy are focused on reacting to how another human is interpreting time, feel, and tone. For guitarist Bill Frisell and bassist Thomas Morgan, that connection is deep and thankfully documented on their latest ECM album, Epistrophy, which is out on April 12th. It’s a continuation of the duo’s previous album for the label, Small Town, and actually was recorded at the same week-long gig at jazz’s most hallowed of halls, the Village Vanguard, in March of 2016.
Although Morgan and Frisell are a generation apart, several common threads connect them. For many years Frisell had a yearly engagement at the Vanguard with his wildly exploratory trio with saxophonist Joe Lovano and shape-shifting drummer Paul Motian. Sadly, Motian passed away in November of 2011 but the sessions for his last album, Windmills of Your Mind, brought Frisell and Morgan together in a quartet with vocalist Petra Haden for an incredible set of standards. “I first met Thomas well before that,” says Frisell. “Joey [Baron] wanted to go over the music for an album [1999’s We’ll Soon Find Out] before Ron Carter got there. Thomas came and played everything just dead-on perfect. Plus, he looks younger than he is, so I thought, ‘Wow, this little kid just came in here and slayed this music.’” (Pro tip: Always prepare for a rehearsal as if it’s a gig.)
Because of those threads it makes sense to hear how well Frisell and Morgan work through “Mumbo Jumbo.” Although Motian’s drumming receives high praise in nearly every corner of the jazz world, his compositions have never received their due. Thankfully, Paul’s niece has created a beautiful two-volume songbook of his original compositions. “Mumbo Jumbo” is the most “out” track from Epistrophy, but also the most fun. Morgan’s big, wooly tone dances between the spots in Motian’s angular melody and Frisell’s exciting and unpredictable improvisations.
After recording two nights worth of music at the Vanguard, Frisell and Morgan went into Avatar Studios to mix the album along with engineer James Farber and ECM kingpin Manfred Eicher. Naturally, the mix is immaculate (a hallmark of ECM’s releases) with Frisell’s Collings I-35 sounding rich and full.
A year before the gigs that produced Small Town and Epistrophy, Frisell and Morgan played their first duo gigs ever at the Vanguard. The venue’s walls are steeped with the sound and history of jazz and it can be somewhat overwhelming to walk down into the basement and step on that stage. “It’s so heavy for me,” says Frisell. “Still I think, can this be real?” It was in the summer of 1969 when an 18-year-old Frisell first went to the Vanguard to see one of vibraphonist Gary Burton’s groups. “Over the years I’ve seen so many people there. Watching [saxophonist] Sonny Rollins at the Vanguard is one of the heaviest things I’ve ever seen,” he says.
Getting up on the stage to play was a whole ’nother story and Frisell points to the late Jim Hall for making that happen. In the early ’70s, Frisell took eight lessons with Hall, who was one of his biggest heroes. “I was just some kid and I took some lessons with Jim,” says Frisell. “I had moved back to New York and I was walking down 6th Avenue near 9th Street and there’s Jim. I couldn’t believe he remembered me.” After exchanging pleasantries, Frisell sent Hall his debut album on ECM, In Line. “About a week later Jim called and said, ‘You were taking lessons from me and now I’m taking lessons from you!’’’
The first time Hall and Frisell played a gig together was a one-off in Minneapolis, but soon after the call came for a stint at the Vanguard. “It was through Jim that I first played the Vanguard and because of that, they started to invite me to bring in my own bands. I hate to say, but back then they wouldn’t give Paul a gig.” Owner Max Gordon thought the drummer’s music was just too adventurous for the room.
Over the next few months, Frisell and Morgan will be hitting the road—not as a duo, but a trio with drummer Rudy Royston. You can head over to billfrisell.com for the full list of tour dates and to keep an eye on Frisell’s many different groups and projects.
The company's first original design aims squarely for the nastiest-fuzz-in-the-universe crown.
RatingsPros:Uniquely evil, brawny, smooth, and robust fuzz voice. Cons: Expensive. Street: $259 jexttelez.tumblr.com
| Tones:  Ease of Use:  Build/Design: Value:  |
I’ll admit, when the Jext Telez Black Drone Wasp landed at my door, I wasn’t in a very fuzzy mood. Music and moods take you to funny places. And though I had been excited about this release, I worried I wasn’t fired up with enough of the requisite adolescent emotion or the smash-stuff-up mindset it takes to appreciate a fuzz that can be measured in mega tonnage. Boy, did that change when I plugged it in.
The Black Drone Wasp is Jext Telez’s first original design. And after executing superb takes on the Selmer Buzz Tone and even the distortion and filter sections of the Vox Conqueror amp, among others, my expectations were high. The three-transistor, germanium Black Drone Wasp lives up to those expectations—and then some. It possesses world-destroying, high-gain fuzz potency and a buzzy, sometimes sonorous, mostly menacing fundamental voice peppered with Sovtek Big Muff mass, Foxx Tone Machine octave complexity, and a Fuzz Face’s top-end heat. It also bubbles over with many unique, super-heavy sounds and colorful tones that are hard to pinpoint in relation to other fuzzes.
Streamlined for Savagery
The wasp graphic on the front of the pedal says much about the BDW’s design intent. That’s good because there is precious little else to tell you what the streamlined control set does. The three toggles are dedicated to bias switching, bass cut, and treble cut, though the graphics say nothing specific about which is which. (I’m pretty sure the graphics under the cut controls represent dips on an EQ band.) The two knobs are for a master volume (logically labeled “V”) and a gain/fuzz control more mysteriously labeled “S.” (For sting?)
Individually, none of the controls shift the basic voice too drastically. Manipulating the toggles delivers the most overt tone shifts. But the gain control basically goes from fuzzy to extremely fuzzy, while the master volume goes from loud to speaker-vaporizingly loud. Still, there are many complex and interesting tones within the Wasp’s palette.
Like every Jext Telez pedal I’ve encountered, the BDW is built with high attention to detail and carefully selected components. Gain comes from three new-old-stock RCA 2N404 transistors, which, as far as I can tell, are not especially common in fuzz circuits (though perhaps they should be). Orange Drop capacitors are used for the frequency-cut sections of the circuit. Everything is tidily situated on a through-hole circuit board, and I/O jacks and the footswitch are chassis mounted. There’s a 9V battery option too.
Primal Potency, Civilized Sheen
The Black Drone Wasp is loud. Very loud. And I’d be surprised if it wasn’t the loudest pedal on most boards. If you’re out to conquer your bandmates in a volume arms race, it might be your best bet. But while the BDW is loud, it doesn’t suffer from the narrow-spectrum, monochromatic tone palette that plagues many high-output pedals.
The basic fuzz voice is complex, with a pleasing harmonic makeup that’s surprisingly even across the EQ spectrum. Bass tones are predictably massive but don’t overwhelm. (The BDW also sounds awesome with bass guitar.) The midrange is pleasing to the ear too. It doesn’t have any of the dry, ear-fatiguing brashness that loud pedals sometimes possess in this frequency range. Instead, midrange tones are contoured around the edges and fill space in gradient colors rather than primary-hued blocks. The top-end output is the most interesting and impressive facet of the BDW’s voice, particularly given the pedal’s volume.
I’d guess it’s the effervescent, percolating buzz that in this high-mid to high-frequency range inspired the pedal’s name. It’s very pronounced, and at certain settings it’s almost the dominant characteristic of the pedal’s voice (which says a lot, given the low-frequency thump and growl in the midrange). Like many of the pedal’s most overt sonic signatures, the fuzz, and the top-end heat that reinforce it, are present without being tiring.
If that stew wasn’t already tasty enough, there’s also a discernable touch of lower octave. It’s a little like the octave presence in a Sovtek Big Muff—stronger perhaps, but still tucked tastefully behind the very balanced whole. The harmonic sum of all this is impressive. And at the right settings, the pedal has almost symphonic balance, or the depth of a freshly tuned, well-intonated 12-string guitar.
If you’re keen on shifting this balance, you can do it easily with the three toggles. But even the pronounced shifts these switches enable still dovetail with the basic voice. The bias switch is the most variable and the most interactive with the other controls. At high-gain settings, the bias switch can make smooth fuzz sounds spittier. In more bass-heavy, treble-cut settings it can emphasize the low-octave content. And it can enhance sustain and add low-end ballast in treble-heavy, high-gain settings.
The germanium transistors mean you can dial back output to a near-clean signal with guitar volume attenuation. The filthy-to-clean attenuation curve is not gentle, though. You often have to use most of the guitar’s volume’s range to get clean tones, which live precariously close to cutting your signal entirely.
The Verdict
As well-tuned and even agreeable as the Black Drone Wasp is, it won’t float everyone’s boat. It’s bold, sometimes bossy, and very loud. But it is quite colorful within its extroverted range. And if you can’t get out in front of a band with this much extra gain, you probably need an extra 200 watts worth of amplifier. The price for all this buzz and brawn is considerable. But the $259 bucks buys you a handcrafted, carefully wired, unique, and thoughtfully designed, small-batch specimen with a big and distinct personality.
Easy steps and tips to help open your creative floodgate in a home-studio setting—and keep it open.
Greetings, readers! As many of you know, I have a YouTube channel where the content mainly consists of demos of pedals and other guitar-related equipment. I've developed a style for these videos, with each including an original song that shows off the tones a piece of gear is capable of producing. This means I'm usually writing, recording, and mixing at least a few tracks each week. I'm often asked about my writing and production process—with questions regarding guitar tones, drums and drum programming, and mixing. Most often, however, people have questions about creativity and avoiding writer's block. To me, it all comes down to efficiency.
You need a zone to get in the zone. I lived in a small house in the '90s that I shared with a friend and his girlfriend. We had a full-blown project-recording studio in the living room with a drum kit, a piano, and guitar amps. We had a nice Soundcraft mixer, two Tascam DA-88 digital recorders, a rack of Neve mic pres, and a vintage U47 tube mic. But the reality is that I got very little done in that studio space. It was really only set up for live tracking.
When I'd sit down to write, I didn't know where to start. I couldn't play drums, so I'd have to rely on drummer pals to come over and lay down grooves, which was loud and impractical. The studio dominated the small house, so if I was trying to be creative with other people at home, they could hear everything I was doing. That made me feel self-conscious and I realized I'd probably get more done if I had a simple 4-track recorder and a drum machine in my bedroom. That way I could close the door and have some privacy!
The most important takeaway from this experience is that it's far more important for me to have a space in which I feel comfortable practicing, writing, or recording, as opposed to a studio full of gear where I feel self-conscious and intimidated.
The gear you choose isn't important. The workflow is. Legendary studio guitarist Tim Pierce was a big inspiration for me when setting up my own recording space. He has a ton of gear, but his workflow is incredibly streamlined. His guitar cabs are always miked, isolated, and ready to track. All his amps are on a switcher so he can quickly try different tones and select whatever cabinet he prefers.
The exact configuration and gear isn't important. What's vital is the fact that he can dial in tones fast, so when he hears an idea in his head, he can be laying it down seconds later. Because he's so comfortable making music in his space, I'd argue that producers would be hard-pressed to get superior results at major full-blown studios with Tim. I can't stress enough that the actual tools aren't the key. It's the organization and efficiency that is paramount. Tim would be just as effective with nothing more than a laptop, headphones, and some plug-ins or digital modelers.
Templates are your friend. With the advent of digital modelers, guitar amp plug-ins, and tools like load boxes and speaker simulators, anyone with a laptop can play and record with world-class tones virtually anywhere. All DAWs and recording interface software will allow you to make what's called a template. Templates are like musical blank canvases that can be personalized. All the routing of inputs, outputs, and plug-in effects and instruments can be stored, so when you sit down to play and create, your virtual studio becomes like a second instrument. You can make different templates for practice, recording, etc., and you can configure them however you like to suit your creative workflow.
What's also become paramount for me is the ability to pull up inspiring drum sounds and parts quickly. It's always more fun and inspiring to play and write riffs and songs if there are some drums to jam to. I personally use Superior Drummer 3, EZdrummer 2, and Steven Slate Drums to get some happening grooves going quickly and easily.
Likewise, great guitar and bass tones can also be had quickly and efficiently in my studio. I'm always patched into a tuner via an A/B box, and, like Tim, I've incorporated an amp switcher into my studio (an Ampete 88S) so I can quickly switch between up to eight heads and a variety of cabinet options. I tend to use plug-ins and modelers for bass (either UA Ampeg plug-ins, or my Axe-Fx III or Line 6 Helix modelers), and I'll sometimes use amp plug-ins for guitar as well.
The biggest key is streamlining from point A (the ideas in your head) to point B (a finished song, riff, or idea). This is how my creative output can stay steady. I've made it easy to practice, record, and be creative. It's never been simpler and it's possible on just about any budget, so imagine your dream creative space and set out to create it. Until next month, I wish you great tone!