If there were an appropriate emoji ideogram for the Bristol Sessions, the 1927 recordings that helped start the framing of what we now know as country music, it wouldn’t be a cartoon face conveying anger, sadness or gratitude — nothing that simple. It might be one of the lesser-known ones: the image of Japanese-carp wind socks on a flagpole, the flags flown on Children’s Day in Japan representing high hopes to navigate the currents of an uncertain life and grow up with health and courage.

The musicians recorded in July and August of that year, by Ralph Peer on State Street in Bristol, Tenn. — the Carter Family, Jimmie Rodgers, the Tenneva Ramblers, B. F. Shelton, Alfred G. Karnes and others — were coaxed out of the environs by a newspaper advertisement but also by their knowledge of the power of recorded sound and the promise of real money. They sang and played with direction and desire: The songs were their babies, and they invested them with their life force.

The guitarist Bill Frisell brought together a trio on Friday night to play some of that music at the Allen Room of Jazz at Lincoln Center, and the performance projected a much more fragile feeling. Mr. Frisell is a wizard of touch and harmony, and a jazz improviser in practice and disposition. He reinvents other people’s songs, sometimes radically. (He is also the guest curator for a continuing series in Jazz at Lincoln Center’s current season, Roots of Americana, the organization’s latest move beyond jazz proper.)

But when he’s in control of a band and playing old American rural music, it can become a sound of a historical comfort, one long lullaby with careful applications of passing chords and bent and carefully warped notes, something to listen to in pajamas. And so Friday’s early set was casual, stylized, spare, genial, dreamy and, except for about four minutes near the end, almost enervated, frustratingly low-impact. (Before and after the show, there was a five-piece student quintet in the theater’s lobby, the East Tennessee State University Old Time Pride Band, playing mountain music coffeehouse style, scratchy, eager and straining to be heard; sometimes you wished Mr. Frisell and his Telecaster could have been dropped in their tank for a while.)