The Westerlies Play Bill Frisell

The Westerlies—trumpeters Riley Mulherkar and Chloe Rowlands, trombonists Andy Clausen and Addison Maye-Saxon—will rearrange your idea of what a brass band can be. Fifteen years ago, the founding members of The Westerlies were wunderkinds in Seattle’s surging jazz scene, their early work highlighted in a New York Times snapshot of the city before they could even graduate from high school. After relocating to New York, four players convened and called themselves The Westerlies, an homage to the winds that had seemingly blown them in from Washington. The acclaim came quickly, with their debut tribute to hometown hero and former teacher Wayne Horwitz called “supremely assured” by JazzTimes. But their broader ambitions and reach steadily became clear on a dozen albums that hinged largely on original pieces the Westerlies had written for themselves. Those works commingle the melodic brightness of bebop and folk with the audacious structures and subjects of modern composition, making The Westerlies both distinct composers and performers.

They are also, however, master interpreters, with a songbook that moves from Aphex Twin to John Prine, from Joni Mitchell to Bertolt Brecht, from traditional holiday numbers to American standards. In this rather new program, they approach an emerging catalogue of such standards—the songbook of Bill Frisell. No stranger to the Big Ears audience, Frisell is one of the guitar’s most distinctive stylists and writers, the warmth of his playing matched only by the curiosity of his writing. As Big Ears begins this year, The Westerlies will issue Have You Heard?, the first volume of their Frisell arrangements for four horns. They perfectly capture the spirit and glow of his pieces, translated for a brass band without equal.