William Richard Frisell was born on March 18, 1951, in Baltimore, Maryland, and spent most of his youth around Denver, Colorado. He began on clarinet in grade school and studied with Richard Joiner of the Denver Symphony, but by his teens he had turned to guitar, drawn first by radio pop and then by Chicago blues and soul; he graduated from Denver East High School and played in bands covering pop and soul hits. His first guitar teacher was Dale Bruning, with whom he later recorded the duo album Reunion (2000). After the University of Northern Colorado, where he took a class with the guitarist Johnny Smith, he moved to Boston and attended the Berklee College of Music, studying with Jon Damian and Michael Gibbs and taking lessons from Jim Hall. In 1978 he spent a year in Belgium writing music, toured with Gibbs and made his first recordings with the German bassist Eberhard Weber, and in 1979 he settled in the New York area.

His break came in 1981, when Pat Metheny could not make a recording session and recommended Frisell to the drummer Paul Motian, who was making Psalm for ECM (released 1982). Frisell became ECM's house guitarist for much of the decade, playing on Jan Garbarek's Paths, Prints (1982) and staying in Motian's groups until the drummer's death in 2011, most famously in the bassless trio with the saxophonist Joe Lovano. His own first album, In Line, was recorded in August 1982 and released in 1983; it mixes four solo pieces with five duets with the bassist Arild Andersen. Rambler (1985) added Kenny Wheeler, Bob Stewart, Jerome Harris and Motian, and Lookout for Hope (recorded March 1987, released 1988) introduced the working band he led for years, with the cellist Hank Roberts, the bassist Kermit Driscoll and the drummer Joey Baron.

In the 1980s Frisell lived in Hoboken, New Jersey, and worked across the New York downtown scene. He joined John Zorn's project The Big Gundown (1986) and became a charter member of Zorn's band Naked City, formed in 1988, whose debut came out in February 1990, and he played in Marc Johnson's Bass Desires, a quartet with John Scofield and the drummer Peter Erskine that recorded Bass Desires (1985 sessions, released 1986) and Second Sight (1987). In 1988 he left New York for Seattle. His first Nonesuch album, Before We Were Born (1989), was followed by Is That You? (1990) and Where in the World? (1991), and then by two records that turned his music toward American song: Have a Little Faith (1992), which takes in Aaron Copland, Charles Ives, Bob Dylan, John Hiatt and Madonna, and This Land (1994), made up of his own pieces. His scores for the Buster Keaton films The High Sign, One Week and Go West, first performed with the films at St. Ann's in Brooklyn in May 1993, were released in 1995, and Quartet (1996) and Nashville (1997, with Jerry Douglas and members of Alison Krauss's Union Station) pushed further into country, bluegrass and folk.

The following decade brought commissions and collaborations of every kind. The Sweetest Punch (1999) reworked Elvis Costello and Burt Bacharach's Painted from Memory for a seven-piece band, Blues Dream grew out of a Walker Art Center commission that premiered on November 15, 1999, and in 2000 he moved to Bainbridge Island, Washington. He recorded with Dave Holland and Elvin Jones (2001), formed the trio of The Willies (2002) with the banjoist Danny Barnes and the bassist Keith Lowe, and served as musical director of the Century of Song concert series at Germany's Ruhrtriennale festival from 2003 to 2005. Unspeakable (2004), built with the producer Hal Willner on samples and turntables, won the 2005 Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Jazz Album. Richter 858 (2005), improvised music inspired by the paintings of Gerhard Richter, introduced his string quartet with violinist Jenny Scheinman, violist Eyvind Kang and the cellist Roberts, and was followed by a trio album with Ron Carter and Motian (2006) and History, Mystery (2008).

Frisell moved to the Savoy label for Beautiful Dreamers (2010), Sign of Life (2011) and All We Are Saying (2011), a set of John Lennon songs, and was named one of the first Doris Duke Artists in 2012 and a resident artistic director at SFJAZZ when it opened in 2013. Big Sur (2013) and the OKeh releases Guitar in the Space Age! (2014) and When You Wish Upon a Star (2016) were followed by Small Town (ECM, 2017), a duo with the bassist Thomas Morgan recorded live at the Village Vanguard in March 2016, his first ECM album as a leader since Lookout for Hope. Berklee gave him an honorary doctorate in 2017, the year he moved to Brooklyn after nearly three decades in the Seattle area. Philip Watson's biography Bill Frisell, Beautiful Dreamer appeared from Faber in May 2022, and Emma Franz made the documentary Bill Frisell: A Portrait.

Since 2019 his main label has been Blue Note: Harmony (October 4, 2019), Valentine (August 14, 2020, a trio with Morgan and the drummer Rudy Royston), Four (November 11, 2022, a bassless quartet with Gregory Tardy, the pianist Gerald Clayton and Johnathan Blake), Orchestras (April 19, 2024, with the Brussels Philharmonic and the Umbria Jazz Orchestra) and In My Dreams (February 27, 2026). Orchestras (Live) and Owl Song, a trio record with the trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire and the drummer Herlin Riley, earned him two Grammy nominations at the 2025 awards. He turned 75 on March 18, 2026, and marked the year with a run of concerts built around the new album, including dates at Blue Note Los Angeles, SFJAZZ in San Francisco, the Moore Theatre in Seattle and the Appel Room at Jazz at Lincoln Center. As of November 2026 his most recent releases are Quiet Lights (May 29, 2026), a trio record with the drummer Florian Arbenz and the saxophonist Greg Osby, and For All Your Flowers (August 2026), his second duo album with the Icelandic bassist Skúli Sverrisson on Newvelle Records.

Frisell's sound is the first thing listeners notice: a warm, bell-like tone, shaped with delay and reverb, in which notes seem to hang and bloom rather than attack. He has said that he plays the sort of harmonies Jim Hall played but with a sound that comes from Jimi Hendrix, and that discovering Wes Montgomery in his teens turned him toward jazz; he also names Paul Motian, Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins, Aaron Copland, Bob Dylan and his teacher Dale Bruning among his influences. His central principle, as he describes it, is to keep the melody sounding even when he is not playing it, which is why standards, folk tunes, hymns and television themes come out recognizable but transformed. After his ECM years he folded country, bluegrass, folk, rock and 1960s pop into a jazz vocabulary of space and understatement, so that his catalog runs from the avant-garde work with John Zorn to the song-based Americana of Nashville and the orchestral writing of Orchestras. The New Yorker likened his use of space to that of Miles Davis, The Wire judged Orchestras the best album by a jazz composer since Gil Evans's prime, and Philip Watson's biography carries the subtitle The Guitarist Who Changed the Sound of American Music. His Americana, folk and country leanings have no counterpart among the standard jazz subgenres, so the tags in the header describe only the jazz side of his work.