A few years ago, my mom gave me a CD for Christmas, because the musician behind the record lives here in Seattle and his mother is my mom’s neighbor.

The record is Blues Dream and the musician is local hero Bill Frisell.

Nothing long winded here; just that it’s an amazing amalgam of languid blues-based jazz that builds more on non-jazz American popular music of the past seventy years than jazz per se. Listening to it over and over I long fantasized that Frisell would make a record with Austin transplant and banjo nutcase Danny Barnes (nutcase is here used in a technical sense, meaning genius), after a while, so it came to pass.

Tracks three and four are “Pretty Flowers Were Made for Blooming” and “Pretty Stars Were Made to Shine.” The titles are taken from the lyrics to Little Maggie, and listening to these two tracks is one of the coolest aural experiences someone who listens to music written before the steam engine was invented might have an opportunity to experience.

Frisell plays out with well-spaced, even stately regularity. Consider him.