'All music is folk music,' Louis Armstrong said. 'I ain't never heard no horse sing a song' - and given that authority, Folk Songs is an apt enough title for the first Bill Frisell 'greatest hits' collection on the Nonesuch label.
No other jazz guitarist of his generation, not even Pat Metheny, has drawn more deeply from the American folk and country music traditions in making music which is, nevertheless, unmistakeably jazz.
He is, however, a multifaceted talent whose jazz, blues and world music interests have inspired him to create a much more varied oeuvre than the tunes on The Best of Bill Frisell, Volume 1: Folk Songs would suggest.
The idea was presumably to make this a tuneful, easily accessible sampler of Frisell's more pastorally slanted recordings.
It draws on only eight of the albums he has released on Nonesuch as a leader (there are more than 20 to date) and sidesteps the darker, more angular side of his playing and composing altogether.
Conspicuously missing are any of the collaborations on which Frisell has been billed as an equal with his fellow musicians - the albums with Dave Holland and Elvin Jones and with Paul Motian and Ron Carter or the Intercontinentals for example - anything from the East/West live album, or from 'special projects' recordings, such as his music for Buster Keaton's films.
It also seems strange, given that Frisell has recorded prolifically for Nonesuch, that the label's first retrospective collection of his work should be a single CD.