the Bill Frisell problem: why we fail to recognize things we ought to love

or another argument for why you should read old books

I.
One of my favourite musicians is the jazz guitarist Bill Frisell. Frisell plays spacey, ethereal melodies on guitar. He’s one of the best-regarded guitarists of our time, the kind of artist fawned over in places like The New Yorker, who wins serious, respected awards; when you speak with serious jazz fans, he is someone everyone raves about.

Another one of my favourite musicians is the jamband guitarist Steve Kimock, who also plays spacey, ethereal melodies on guitar.

Kimock is highly regarded among Phish fans and Deadheads, which makes sense: he spends most of his time playing Grateful Dead-inspired music and was once described as Jerry Garcia’s favourite guitarist nobody had ever heard of.

The thing is, Frisell and Kimock both play the same kind of guitar, in the same style—both have written excellent melodic compositions, and in my view are similarly skilled. They are both absolutely beloved by die-hard music obsessives. But for the most part, fans of Frisell—respectable, elitist, smug jazz fans—don’t listen to or even know who Kimock is. And fans of Kimock—smug Deadhead and Phish fan nerds—don’t, for the most part, listen to Frisell (though a much wider percentage of Kimock fans would know and love Frisell than vice versa).

My view is that their music is so similar, their styles so overlapping, and their talents so comparable, that anyone who is a fan of one should be a fan of both. I will note that as of 2003, when an interviewer asked Frisell about Kimock, he revealed he had never heard his music.

II.

Frisell plays with jazz musicians, at jazz venues, writing compositions in a jazz style. Kimock plays with jamband musicians, at jamband venues, focussing on jamband things (extended improv with soaring peaks).

While some of this is a matter of discovery (if you like jazz, you’re more likely to discover musicians popular in jazz circles), the deeper point is that because Frisell is framed in the language and context of jazz, he is accessible to those who already inhabit that world—but because Kimock is from a different context, they struggle to understand him.

The sad reality is that most people are unable to appreciate great things that are perfectly up their alley because those things are wrapped in a vocabulary and context they’re foreign to. We like to imagine that we judge music, books, and ideas on their merits — how much they resonate with us. Sadly, we often judge the packaging instead. More interestingly, we often don’t even realize that something belongs to the same category as the things we already love. The jazz fan doesn’t dislike Steve Kimock; they simply never realize that Kimock could provide the same joy to them that Frisell does.

III.

When you ask smart, nerdy, religious Jews what their favourite texts are, two of the most frequently cited are Pirkei Avot and Mesillat Yesharim: The Path of the Just, both seminal texts in the Mussar movement, a kind of Stoic-Buddhist-adjacent self-improvement tradition within Judaism.

Pirkei Avot is a compilation of ethical wisdom from Talmudic sages: wisdom about how to live, how to treat others, how to approach learning. Path of the Just is an 18th-century guide to moral self-improvement. While I enjoyed both, what stands out to me is that they don’t read exclusively as “Jewish” books; rather, they read as fairly standard entries in a broad tradition of aphoristic wisdom literature, the kind of thing you find in Stoic philosophy, in Confucianism, or in plenty of modern secular writing, but approved for religious Jews to read. The problem is that most religious Jews forego the rest of this content, even when I suspect some of it would resonate much more with them, simply because it’s not “Jewish”—or in my preferred phrasing, because it is not packaged in a context they understand.

IV.

It’s not just the religious people who are this insular.

One of my favourite thinkers and writers is the Canadian philosopher Joseph Heath. Heath is incredibly sharp, and writes some of the most insightful and interesting content about economics, philosophy, politics, and public policy that I’ve ever read. Despite covering all the same subjects that Slatestarcodex and Marginal Revolution readers love, with the same level of rigour and clarity—most of them don’t know or read Heath. Not, in my view, because his content isn’t excellent or wouldn’t be of interest to them, but because Heath doesn’t write in their context, with their language, with their references, or with them as his intended audience. Similar to the jazz fan who doesn’t know Kimock, Heath’s inaccessibility isn’t just because he isn’t linked to on LessWrong, but something broader.

V.
There are two important implications of this.

The first, and more obvious one, is that to expand the richness in our life and discover more things that add meaning and joy, we should learn how to appreciate things which are up our alley, but not framed in the context of our subculture.

The second, and more important implication, is that this dynamic works going the other way—protecting us from dismissing ideas we would benefit from engaging with.

Today, we shut off a large number of ideas simply because of their framing. If someone is writing something, and they are, for example, a Trump supporter, a rationalist, or a woke person, and they write using the framework, ideas, and vocabulary of their tribe, many will instinctively dismiss them.

When we engage with something new, we often pre-judge it: “Oh, just another effective altruist,” or “pfft, this person is a Trump supporter.” This heuristic acts as a gatekeeper before any real engagement can occur.

This is one of the reasons why reading old books and watching movies from a different time or place is so important. In every era, there are the kinds of people who possess the exact same psychological frameworks as today’s Trump supporters, rationalists, or woke. But when you read their thoughts and ideas, whether in a Tolstoy novel or a 1960s Italian film, your modern pattern-matching gatekeeping heuristic fails. Because these people don’t use the same contemporary language or share the specific affiliations of the groups you normally reject, the gatekeeping doesn’t work. You can’t easily sort them into the “bad group,” so you can actually engage with these perspectives more neutrally.

So while the easy solution is just to read more old books, the greater task is to recognize how much we act like the Bill Frisell fans who refuse to listen to Steve Kimock and try to develop to the point where you like metaphorical Kimock of your life — and to realize that this generalizes to everything.

If anyone wants to explore more Bill Frisell or Steve Kimock, both of whom I cannot recommend highly enough — for Frisell, I’d start with Good Dog, Happy Man or his live album East/West. For Kimock, I highly recommend this show, which you can stream from the Live Music Archive.