In the pandemic lockdowns five years ago, an album was released that I just couldn’t stop playing over and over. Bill Frisell’s Valentine became a constant companion during those unsettling and eerie times.

The interplay between the prolific genre-bending 74-year-old guitarist, young bassist Thomas Morgan and drummer Rudy Royston was so subtle, integrated and yet so immediate that you felt they were there playing in your living room. On top of that, the Blue Note engineers had created a production masterpiece.

So when it was announced that he would be coming through Sydney touring with his trio and playing songs from the album, it felt like this would be a night not to be missed, much like the recent appearance of that other jazz guitar colossus, Pat Metheny. But whereas that one was in the full grandeur of the Opera House Concert Hall as a one-man show packed with a wondrous array of guitars, state-of-the-art IT and an amazing “orchestra” driven by solenoids and hydraulics, here Frisell sticks to one from his collection of 60-plus guitars – a much customised Fender Telecaster – and an array of effects pedals producing a symphony of delays, loops, echoes, wah-wahs and reverb.