Jazz musicians: if they're not moaning about their art, they're redoing some miserable pop tune to improve their finances. The "crossover move" has been in play since Louis Armstrong and Nat "King" Cole, though these days more than a few bona fide jazzers rely on it for rent money. So skepticism is in order when approaching guitarist Bill Frisell's album of covers, Have a Little Faith, which includes Madonna's "Live to Tell," Dylan's "Just Like a Woman" and John Hiatt's "Have a Little Faith in Me."

Then again, consider this. Frisell is one of the under-appreciated masters of guitar, perhaps its purest innovator since John McLaughlin. In a world crowded with guitar wizards, his surround-sound drones and commitment to texture make him instantly identifiable. He is known for the pastel environments he creates as much as for his jugular-seeking solos.

For the past few years, Frisell has used these devices to hone a composition style in which weepy country melodies coexist with rumbling funk bass lines and kitschy Fifties rock is juxtaposed with graceful, surprisingly arresting dissonances. It is a style governed by rock & roll's disregard for convention: Themes are there one minute and explode the next.

This approach – best heard on Where in the World? (1991) and Lookout for Hope (1988) – is among the most vital developments in improvised music, yet because it is neither easy listening nor a rote repetition of some forty-year-old jazz tradition, it is routinely ignored. Hence, Faith – on which Frisell detonates other people's melodies. This is anticrossover music: A classic bait and switch, it promises familiar songs, then expands them beyond the composer's original intent. With giddy recklessness, Frisell and his excellent band (bassist Kermit Driscoll, drummer Joey Baron, clarinetist Don Byron, accordionist Guy Klucevsek) contort every note and reposition every phrase until something fundamentally new emerges.

These renovations are not only performed on pop songs. Frisell and crew tackle Aaron Copland's ballet Billy the Kid, drastically changing the development sections to include spontaneous-sounding interplay. Elsewhere, the group offers a seat in front of the wiseass section of a high-school marching band for Sousa's "Washington Post March," makes a lugubrious Charles Ives theme seem lighthearted and turns a bright-eyed standard ("When I Fall in Love") into a cliffhanging drama.

While Frisell's anarchistic arrangements take liberties, the integrity of the song is always maintained. The ten-minute version of "Live to Tell" says it all: After creeping through the initial verses, Frisell uses a soaring single note to propose an interlude. Soon he is leading his band through a collective-improvisation tantrum in which traces of Madonna's melody are tossed around and the pent-up emotions of the lyric thrash to the surface. The theme eventually returns, and its calm tone provides a measure of just how far Frisell and his group have traveled in the process of embellishment. If you don't have a different appreciation for "Live to Tell" by the time this is finished, you weren't listening. (RS 656)

TOM MOON