Here’s hoping this writeup lasts not much longer than David Friesen’s meditative Inner Voices. What exactly was David Friesen’s Inner Voices? Much like Eberhard Weber in Europe, in America, David was that kind of quicksilver, enigmatic, bass player that played on countless “jazz” records spanning from bebop, free jazz, modal, and other chin scratching, heady styles. Inner Voices is a profound record not because it’s a wholesale cleansing of that past but a liberation to take a more personal track towards something else — New Age minimal jazz of a different stripe.
It wouldn’t be wrong to surmise that David’s home base of the Pacific Northwest plays a huge role in his life as it would in his career. Born in Tacoma, Washington he’d grow up listening to jazz stations playing from Seattle crossing over the Cascadias. His instrument of note, the upright acoustic-electric bass, didn’t come out of choice but out of happenstance. On some fateful day, his sister’s paramour left one in their home and he purposefully fiddled with it, surprised someone would play such a lackluster instrument. With one pluck and one stroke of it with a bow, he found out that there was a vastness to it that he couldn’t quite comprehend but wanted to really uncover.
David’s study and prowess on the upright bass allowed him to take up spaces in various classical orchestras and to sit in jazz sessions for groups that would cover his area of the world. As an enlistee in the military he’d perform in Europe, learning the ropes (so to speak) of music that he’d never heard at home. In short notice, he’d become an in demand musician who’d travel out and fall into the typical pitfalls of many jazz musicians. His lost ‘70s forced him to reassess his condition. In the ‘80s, increasingly more in tune with living a cleaner life and turning toward personal growth, so too did David Friesen’s music shift into more pensive, elegiac forms.
Not retreating, but rediscovering his life by moving to the outskirts of Portland, Oregon, one would find David decamping to his organic farm in between sessions building a cafe or toiling the land, helping his family have a healthy farmstead to grow in. Now ever more spiritually aware, he’d began working with others in the mercurial American New Age scene. Perhaps due to an outgrowth of that original spiritual jazz he heard from Coltrane and the ambient one he loved from Miles, with others like Paul Horn, Chick Corea, and Steve Halpern, all musicians who found a way to transmute known ways into this newer way.
Adopting electronics like looping effects, samplers, drum machines, shakuhachi and ideas from world music, gradually pushed his solo music out of a solely jazz world into a less pinpointable sound. Inner Voices, released on Global Pacific, home of other wayward spiritual jazz musicos, was the perfect fit for that new idea.
Songs like “Early Morning Rises” stretch his specially-made Oregon bass (a portable upright electric bass) into a multi-instrument capable of many mantras. Standards like “Amazing Grace”, “Greensleeves”, and “O Come, O Come Emmanuel” mirror his spiritual growth through music that reverberates with the pure essence of originals, edged out with sonic adornments that are truly unexpected. Other originals like “Journey” find him switching from plucked bass to bowed, and multi-tracking intricate floating compositions that sound just like the wonderful “blue open-sky” album cover. Perfectly placed contributions by friends Paul Horn and Jeff Johnson take their more openly religious work into David’s more ethereal one.
If I can leave you with one track to listen to, take a peek/listen to “Forever Unending”. Here, that same metronomic background from before yields to a different expression where the full resonating body of the bass seems to stretch itself to the point of weightless abstraction. It’s a touching ode to something I just can’t quite pinpoint, yet. In the end who knew that a simple bass instrument could get you there?