Film-maker Bill Morrison's movie-collage The Great Flood, a solemn procession of battered, monochrome movie images from the Mississippi river disaster of 1927, would be a memorable drama even played in total silence. In closeup, it shows trickling streams and rain on cotton plants swelling into torrents; cigar-toting politicians gesticulate reassuringly, and the wealthy making dignified retreats while the impoverished cling to the remains of shacks. Guitarist Bill Frisell's live soundtrack of howling blues chords, Thelonious Monk hooks, country-swing and Old Man River quotes would make a fine concert without a film, too. Put the two together, however, as Frisell and Morrison have been doing this year, and the result moves up another creative and emotional level. The Great Flood has been one of the highlights of the 2012 London jazz festival so far.

Film by Bill Morrison
Music by Bill Frisell
Produced by Phyllis Oyama

2011, 80 min, HD

The Mississippi River Flood of 1927 was the most destructive river flood in American history. In the spring of 1927, the river broke out of its banks in 145 places and inundated 27,000 square miles to a depth of up to 30 feet.

Part of it enduring legacy was the mass exodus of displaced sharecroppers. Musically, the “Great Migration” of rural southern blacks to Northern cities saw the Delta Blues electrified and reinterpreted as the Chicago Blues, Rhythm and Blues, and Rock and Roll.

Using minimal text and no spoken dialog, filmmaker Bill Morrison and composer / guitarist Bill Frisell have created a powerful portrait of a seminal moment in American history through a collection of silent images matched to a searing original soundtrack.

Performed by
Bill Frisell, Guitar
Ron Miles, Trumpet
Tony Scherr, Bass, Guitar
Kenny Wollesen, Drums, Vibes

"Like rust on once grand machines, touches of distortion and atonality corrode these folk melodies, our appreciation of them today informed by all that they've been through and how they've survived. That goes for the images in Morrison's film as well.

The feeling stirred in me by this great, gently haunted music is something like that stirred by the coda to Copeland's "Appalachian Spring": a sense that the America spirit still endures, as a wistful, forward-looking slip rooted in the deep past, one that still sings despite our succession of hard times, tragedies, and all the cruelties and stupidities done in its name."

- Alan Scherstuhl, on "The Great Flood at Herbst Theater, San Francisco, 4/21/12

“The Great Flood” is a Glowing Alternative History of the Birth of Rock n’ Roll

"ranks high among the most purely enjoyable Duke Performances shows I’ve seen."