Danny Barnes: "In all honesty, I didn't know much about Bill's music when he first called. He said, 'My name is Bill. Can I take a guitar lesson?' I said, 'I don't really give lessons, but you can come over and jam if you want.'

"He said he had a band and had made records, so I said, 'Well, where do you play in New York?' because I thought that would give me an idea of what level he was on. He said, 'The Village Vanguard,' and I said, 'Wait a minute, who is this?'"

Wayne Horvitz: "The worst thing you can do is try to imitate a music you're not grounded in. It's almost always a disaster. When jazz musicians try to play Indian music, for example, it's almost always terrible.

"But if a jazz musician who loves Indian music expresses that love through jazz, something new will come in the side door. That's what we're doing."

Bill Frisell: "When I did the Nashville project, I realized I had heard a lot of country music over the years and I realized I really liked it. And when I let myself like it, I became fascinated with trying to find what it had in common with jazz....

"What interested me the most were those moments when you couldn't tell if someone was black or white, from deep in the south or from Canada -- whether it was African music being influenced by hillbilly music, or the other way around.

"I like it when our assumptions get messed up. The deeper you look into American music, the more the names, boundaries and all the racial stuff just melt away. It just becomes music.

"That's what I'm trying to find."