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The music soaks through these images but rarely seems to comment upon them. Once in a while, Wollsen's kickdrum hits at the same time that a hay bale is turned over on screen. Sequences of delta musicians whaling away at their instruments are layered over with Frisell's more restrained -- often delicate -- playing, and the juxtaposition is revealing: As surely as headwaters reach the delta, that music that we can't hear in these scenes, somehow, through decades of American invention, has led to this.
The images in an early sequence called "Tributaries" make literal what much of Frisell's music has long suggested. Over shots of moody rain, Frisell drizzles gentle notes that at first seem to have only an incidental relationship to each other. Then, as the rain picks up, and hillsides turn to mud, the chords emerge, and the band slowly kicks up, accumulating power, rolling in like a storm or that river, until the film and the musicians both are at full surge. "Tributaries" and a concluding piece on African-Americans' migration north -- another resonant flood -- count among Frisell's most affecting work.
Between these torrents and laments, Frisell and the band offered up lopsided hops, cockeyed blues, and one stirring, heartbroken work song. The result is a cohesive portrait not just of the flood itself but of how we might feel about it today: muted, curious, touched, troubled, and even amused. This is no wail like Terence Blanchard's Katrina piece When the Levees Broke, but just like that powerful work, The Great Flood is one that -- once it's finally waxed -- will be worth revisiting.
If you aren't familiar with Frisell's distinctive guitar, or the way he can sound like three players at once, or his exquisite tenderness, or his way with a standard, check out this performance of several John Lennon songs on NPR. It's more gorgeous, to my mind, than the record Frisell was promoting, his recent All We Are Saying Lennon tribute.
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