THE CURIOUS GUITAR OF Bill frisell

He treats every note as a question. It's an approach that's made him a favorite of artists across the spectrum. GP asks the guitar legend a few questions of our own.

- BILL MILKOWSKI

When the Beatles made their American debut on The Ed Sullivan Show on February 9, 1964, it inspired a generation of Boomers to pick up the guitar.

But it was a much earlier TV broadcast that helped turn Bill Frisell on to the instrument, when he was a boy growing up in Denver. Credit Jimmie Dodd, host of The Mickey Mouse Club, with planting the six-string seed in Frisell’s young brain. Dodd was Head Mousketeer during the televised show’s initial 1955 to 1959 run, when it was shown five days a week on ABC stations across the country. He wasn’t just an actor; Dodd also wrote the program’s theme song and premiered his Mousegetar on the November 11, 1955 show, which aired just a few months before Frisell’s fifth birthday [see youtube. com/watch?v=XWLrPg_altI]. Dodds’ adeptness on the instrument was immediately evident in the crisp, Django-esque filigrees he played between strummed chords on the tune “I’m a Guitar.” It may have been that very song that first captured the imagination of young Billy Frisell.