At the opening of Beautiful Dreamer, Bill Frisell’s biographer, Philip Watson, recounts a formative dream Bill Frisell once had—an experience the guitarist has said permanently altered the way he thinks about sound, color, and the nature of “real music.” In the dream, Frisell enters a dark building, climbs into a vast library, and encounters hooded, monklike figures gathered around a table. “We want to show you what things really are,” they tell him. First, they reveal “what colors really look like,” and then they offer to let him hear “what real music sounds like.” Frisell has often said that this dream reshaped his musical imagination, and he still carries it with him.
His Blue Note Records album, In My Dreams, points directly to that vision. The title is not…