In the history of unlikely musical collaborations, there are few more improbable than Elvis Costello and Burt Bacharach's 1998 album Painted From Memory. But there's little question the collaboration did much to reinvigorate both musicians. Costello got to explore his deepest pop ambitions, while Bacharach got a whole new audience to understand his songwriting talent (once it wasn't buried behind a bunch of sappy lyrics about people who could make birds appear suddenly, which always reminds me of a certain Hitchcock movie).
Less well known is that there was a third collaborator on the project--the inventive jazz guitarist Bill Frisell. Costello and Bacharach sent demo tapes of their new songs to Frisell, who worked up small-group jazz arrangements of them. Frisell assembled a group and began recording The Sweetest Punch independent of (but simultaneous to) Painted From Memory.
While Painted From Memory was a pure, lush, 60s-style pop album, The Sweetest Punch is a thoroughly contemporary jazz session. Frisell and his group use intriguing instrumentation (when's the last time you heard a clarinetist playing an Elvis Costello song?) and quirky harmonic arrangements to draw out some of the hidden possibilities in the Costello/Bacharach songs. For example, on Painted From Memory, "Such Unlikely Lovers" was a slick piece of filler. The version on Frisell's album, though, is slinky, funky, and experimental, featuring a meaty guitar solo from Frisell himself. It segues into a nice, hung-over-sounding reading of "This House Is Empty Now."
Costello himself appears on two of the album's tracks, a lush reading of "Toledo" that plays up the song's ambiguity (I've never been able to figure out who's leaving who, and I'm sure Elvis wants it that way) and a brilliant (if brief) duet of "I Still Have That Other Girl" with Cassandra Wilson. Wilson also sings "Painted From Memory" accompanied only by Frisell's acoustic arch-top guitar, but her reading is a little too reserved and detached for my tastes--it almost makes the song sound a little thin. A little bass and some tasty brushwork would have helped here, I think.
Track by track through the rest of the album: Frisell chose to open with the title track, which was Painted From Memory's most buoyant moment, filled with chimes and strings and some strong, emotional singing from Costello. Here Frisell and his group give it a fairly straight, laid-back reading.
Altoist Billy Drewes does some nice work on "What's Her Name Today?" that, at times, reminded me a little of Arthur Blythe in his poppier, mellower moments.
"In The Darkest Place" opened Painted From Memory, but here its despair is magnified with creepy quiet guitar work until some glorious ensemble writing closes things off.
Article comments
1 - Tom Johnson
Frisell is one of the few artist who can take something like Bacharach and really make something new of it. His take of "What the World Needs Now" is breathtaking. It's available on a Bacharach tribute John Zorn's Tzadik label (no kidding) put out a number of years ago but you might be able to track down a fantastic live version from Poland in, I believe, 1993 (I have this show, just don't have it next to me to check on the date.)
2 - godoggo
The Blythe cover picture picture caught my eye. I lovelovelovelove Lennox Ave Breakdown, but I wish someone would come out with a CD version with all 4 tunes in their complete versions, instead of fading in the middle of those blazing improvs.
The First Frisell I ever heard, the album that made me a fan, was Billy Hart's Oshumare, and I've never heard him sound better.