Nels Cline Is Not A Jazz Guitarist
Nathan West
I first heard Nels Cline in 1999, when he and drummer Gregg Bendian released Interstellar Space Revisited. The original Interstellar Space album was a set of four saxophone-drums duos played by John Coltrane and Rashied Ali, recorded in February 1967 but not released until September 1974. It’s volcanic and meditative at once; Coltrane takes his music about as far out as it can go, and Ali is with him all the way, delivering explosive rattling runs but also settling into a mellow, even gentle pulse at times, like wind blowing through a field.
Cline and Bendian transform the music, turning it into an absolute firestorm of sound. Playing through an array of distortion effects, Cline’s guitar is as hellish as anything on any metal or noise-rock record you can name, but Coltrane’s mantra-like melodies are still audible. And on the third track, “Venus,” they honor the gentle side of the music as well. There’s real beauty in their work, even when it’s sanding your face off. (Ali liked it, too. When a writer from The Wire played him the CD in early 2000, he said, “These guys really did their homework. I’m very impressed.”)
“The sound of John Coltrane’s tenor saxophone and the mood conjured up by pieces like ‘Africa’ or ‘Alabama’ or ‘After The Rain,’ ‘Wise One,’ ‘Lonnie’s Lament’ …this marked for me my awareness of jazz music beyond what I knew from television or from my dad’s swing-era big band stuff or his Lena Horne records or whatever,” Cline tells me by phone. He became obsessed, but — unlike Sonny Sharrock, who often described himself as a saxophonist playing a fucked-up axe — he wasn’t trying to be a Coltrane-esque player himself. “I think what I was more interested in, at least what galvanized me early on, was the mood of his music and the incredible spirituality and sincerity of his direction.”
Sincerity, paired with a real sense of sonic adventure, is the through-line of Cline’s astonishingly varied career, which goes back to the late ’70s. He and his twin brother, percussionist Alex Cline, both appeared on saxophonist Tim Berne’s 1980 album 7X, and you can already hear his guitar style taking shape in the track above. A few years later, the brothers toured Europe with Julius Hemphill, recording the album Georgia Blue at the Willisau Festival. “Julius was still kind of getting his chops back, having been in this kind of R&R mode or whatever, so it’s not always his best playing on that record, certainly not mine,” Cline says. But he’s emphatic about Hemphill’s genius as a writer and arranger, calling out “in my mind, an extension of the incredibly dense harmonies that one could hear even in the 1930s in Duke Ellington’s band… a really ingenious and intricate rhythmic and harmonic world and language.”
Cline has often seemed to divide his time between the worlds of avant-garde jazz and underground rock. For every collaboration with Wadada Leo Smith or tribute to Andrew Hill (New Monastery, from 2006), there’s a Geraldine Fibbers album. And of course, he’s spent the last 21 years as a member of Wilco.
“I had no dream or plan to join a prominent rock band in 2004,” he says, “but I had met Jeff [Tweedy] in the late ’90s when I was playing on tour with the Geraldine Fibbers, and we opened for Golden Smog, which was the sort of side project that Jeff and a couple of guys from the Jayhawks and a couple of other guys from the band did.”
When the call came a few years later, Cline was surprised, but willing. He’d been managing to avoid having a day job, but just barely, and the idea of being comfortable was appealing. But Wilco offered more than that — it offered artistic challenges. “I didn’t know what my role would be at all,” he says. “In fact, on A Ghost Is Born, the record that we were touring on with this new version of the band, Jeff’s playing all this really cool guitar. So I just didn’t know what he wanted me for. But his reaction was, well, we’ll figure it out. And we did.”
Cline is more than a dozen years older than anyone else in the band, but musically and personally, he fits right in. “I think we like what we’re doing and we like each other. It’s really simple. It’s like, the band totally gets along. There’s a lot of mutual respect. And I’m proud of the shows. And I’m not actually uncomfortable with what I call rock pageantry. And I don’t mean prancing around, but I mean, production, lighting, these kinds of ‘big show’ kind of ways of presenting music… I get to rock out and at the same time do what I do.”
A few years ago, Cline participated in a strange avant-jazz/avant-rock summit conference: He and Deerhoof drummer Greg Saunier were invited to form a one-off improvising quartet with Anthony Braxton and trumpeter Taylor Ho Bynum. The result, after two days of sessions at Firehouse 12 in Connecticut, was the four-CD box Quartet (New Haven) 2014, a set of four hour-long improvisations dedicated to Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, James Brown, and Merle Haggard, respectively.
The story began at the Willisau Festival in August 2013, where Cline and Saunier were performing as a duo. “Greg said, ‘I think this is Anthony Braxton on our flight, getting off the plane.’ I was like, ‘What, really? Well, I met him in the ’70s, you know, and he’s always been really friendly to me since then.'” They connected, and the four of them — Cline, Saunier, Braxton, and Bynum — spent much of the day together, with the jazz musicians watching the rock artists’ set. A few months later, they were invited to Firehouse 12, where they all had dinner and Braxton brought out a book of graphic scores — multicolored drawings intended to inspire and shape improvisation. But he said the players were free to use them, or not.
“Braxton just kind of brushed aside the idea of using these graphic scores,” Cline recalls. “But Greg particularly, I think, really paid a lot of attention to the scores. And I was paying attention maybe half the time and listening the rest of the time.” The time element was more important to Braxton, who literally brought out an hourglass. “I’d never improvised with a time in mind, a time constraint — even though an hour doesn’t seem like constraint, but at least it’s a kind of structure that changes the way you play the music. Because quite often when improvising, we have these, you know, magical endings or whatever. Well, that wasn’t a possibility, unless the magical ending happened an hour later.”
Cline describes the resulting box as “some severe stuff,” an assessment I agree with. It’s spare, spiky, and a challenging listen, though there are plenty of exciting passages. “I don’t know how many people can listen to four hours of us playing, but that’s very Braxton, you know, very unstinting.”
For the last decade or so, Cline has been releasing albums on Blue Note, including a disc with his long-running group the Nels Cline Singers and another featuring a quartet called the Nels Cline 4 with fellow guitarist Julian Lage. His Blue Note debut, though, really stands out in his catalog. Lovers, released in 2016, is a double CD that features Cline backed by a 22-member chamber orchestra that includes horns, strings, his brother Alex on percussion, and his wife Yuka Honda on celeste and synthesizer. The music includes original compositions, versions of jazz standards like “Why Was I Born?”, “Glad To Be Unhappy,” and “Beautiful Love,” as well as versions of the theme to the 1970s movie The Night Porter and Sonic Youth’s “Snare, Girl,” from A Thousand Leaves. And while there are some strange noises buried in the mix, Cline himself is playing gentle, melodic jazz guitar in the spirit of Jim Hall throughout.
“I’ve been dreaming about making that record or a record somewhat like that for, at that point, it must have been 20-plus years, 25 years maybe,” he says. “It was just a concept of trying to make, initially, in the ’80s probably when I was thinking about it, a kind of dark romance record instead of a sweet romance record. But as time wore on and as the repertoire list that I was constantly making and revising got closer to reality, the record, along with aspects of, I guess I could say my personal life, got lighter overall.”
As a result, Lovers is an almost swooningly romantic album, verging on 1950s mood music but played with impeccable modern jazz skill by everyone involved. “If you look at the personnel on Lovers, it’s pretty stunning who I got… three or four of them maybe were people I didn’t know that Michael [Leonhart, arranger/conductor] knew, but everybody else, they were friends and quite often people who I’ve been listening to for decades and have immense respect for, obviously. So yeah, it’s a dream project, and dream projects don’t happen too often.”
Cline’s latest album, Consentrik Quartet, features a new band made up of old collaborators. He’s been working with drummer Tom Rainey for decades, first in a trio with accordionist and keyboardist Andrea Parkins and later in the Nels Cline 4, and was a member of bassist Chris Lightcap’s band Superette. The three of them began playing as a trio around New York, which led to an invitation to perform at John Zorn’s venue the Stone — not in its usual location in Greenwich Village, but in Brooklyn. “I did the first night with Chris and Tom as a trio. And then the second night, I thought I’d invite [saxophonist Ingrid Laubrock] because I admire her playing and she is Tom’s wife. So I thought it would just be, you know, pleasant and good music making. And that’s exactly what it turned out to be.”
The album shifts back and forth between two modes: pieces with strong, hooky riffs that provide a platform for energetic solos, and more atmospheric work that floats and drones and pings. “I kind of had a different idea for some of the Consentrik music,” Cline says. “I think most of what I was thinking about doing was a little more along the lines of what you hear on the record like, you know, ‘Down Close’ and ‘Time Of No Sirens’ and maybe ‘Inner Wall,’ things like that,” he explains, naming all the hushed, exploratory pieces. “But pretty soon I ended up writing things like ‘House Of Steam’ and ‘The 23.’ But everyone liked those tunes. I actually asked them because I wasn’t sure they were any good. And they approved.”
Consentrik Quartet is one of the most immediately “jazzy” records in Cline’s sprawling catalog. At the same time, it’s got a barbed, rock edge. And at the beginning of our conversation, he was adamant that he’s not a jazz guitarist. So as we finished, I asked him what the words “jazz guitar” meant to him.
He laughed. Then he said, “Well, there’s a lot of things that it means to me. And off the top of my head, I don’t think they relate to my playing so much because I’m kind of a jazz tourist a bit. You know, I haven’t dedicated my life to the art form. I guess I’m more than a dabbler. But when I think jazz guitar, it’s almost like the first name that pops into my head is Wes Montgomery, and then Jim Hall, maybe, and George Benson. But it’s a rich harmonic universe with generally dulcet tone, and not too much, you know, distortion and looping and all that stuff. That’s my kind of rigid, archival idea of jazz guitar. But in reality, I guess any kind of instrumental foray with linear, melodic, and harmonic richness is jazz guitar, but I do have this idea that it sounds kind of like Wes Montgomery, ideally. Or Jim Hall. I mean, it’s just the classic, pure musicality, understated, constantly interesting, just the most sophisticated and beautiful thing.”
TAKE 10
Dayna Stephens - "Trust"
Saxophonist Dayna Stephens’ latest album is a reunion of the band that performed on his 2021 release Right Now! Live At The Village Vanguard: pianist Aaron Parks, bassist Ben Street, and drummer Gregory Hutchinson. I find him fascinating because his music is extremely thoughtful and patient, rarely rising to passionate heights. In some ways he reminds me of Charles Lloyd, an almost beatific figure playing soothing lines over gentle, but swinging rhythms. There’s a lot of discourse all the time, but especially the last few years, about masculinity and what emotions are denied to young men or seen as impermissible/unseemly. This manifests in jazz sometimes, particularly among saxophonists, who are encouraged/forced to scream and roar and play in a hyper-macho way. Dayna Stephens doesn’t do that. He lets you hear him thinking and feeling, and the results, as on the ballad “Trust,” are beautiful. Settle back and take the ride. (From Hopium, out now via Contagious Music.)
Nick Hempton/Cory Weeds - "Last Train From Overbrook"
A few years ago, I learned about an amazing but forgotten group: the Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis and Johnny Griffin Quintet. These two saxophonists teamed up in the early 1960s with pianist Junior Mance, bassist Larry Gales, and drummer Ben Riley backing them and made a string of killer albums featuring tight horn interplay and hard-swinging rhythms. (Trivia note: In 1961, they recorded Lookin’ At Monk, an entire album of Thelonious Monk compositions, and four years later, Monk hired Gales and Riley for his album Monk.) Anyway, Nick Hempton, an Australian living in New York, and Cory Weeds, a Canadian and owner of the Cellar Music label, have teamed up on a collection of soul jazz and hard bop tunes, and it opens with a jumping version of “Last Train From Overbrook,” from the Davis/Griffin album Griff And Lock. Listen to this version, then the original, which’ll blow your hair back. (From Horns Locked, out now via Cellar Live.)
Muriel Grossmann - "Happiness"
Spiritual jazz saxophonist Muriel Grossmann has released 15 studio albums since 2008; this is her first live release. She has a remarkably consistent discography, working with a tight-knit crew — guitarist Radomir Milojkovic has been there from the beginning, and drummer Uros Stamenkovic since 2016’s Natural Time. Hammond organ player Abel Boquera is a relative newcomer; he was first heard on 2023’s Devotion, which was released on Jack White’s Third Man label. This performance is from November 2022 at a club in Köln, Germany, and it’s a terrific document of four musicians absolutely locked in. Grossmann’s compositions are built around mantralike melodies and swinging, modal grooves, but there’s a shift in the energy from studio (where she overdubs layers of percussion, multiple horns, and more) to stage, and “Happiness,” a hard blues, exemplifies that perfectly. She and Milojkovic are on fire, as Boquera and Stamenkovic slip into a seamless, steady roll. (From MGQ Live Im King Georg, Köln, out now via Powerhouse.)
Alberto Novello & Rob Mazurek - "Cosmic Debris"
Have you ever played around with VCV Rack? It’s an online modular synth emulator that allows you to create repetitive but ever-shifting electronic patterns, and the results can be extraordinarily meditative. The first time I was able to successfully run virtual cables from a tone generator through a string of modulators and produce an eerie but warm series of pings and bloops, it made my whole week. I sat there letting it run for hours. This album is a collaboration between modular synth player Alberto Novello and horn player Rob Mazurek, who also adds bells, shakers, and a few samples. The electronic sounds hum and crackle, pulse and waver, and Mazurek’s trumpets float through like jellyfish catching the sun for a moment before drifting back down into the ocean’s depths. At times, like on “Cosmic Debris,” which opens the album, it sounds like Don Cherry collaborating with Autechre. It’s fantastic. (From Sun Eaters, out now via Hive Mind.)
Nicole McCabe - "Balloon Race"
Saxophonist Nicole McCabe’s new album is another record that exists in a shimmering, hazy neon-lit zone between jazz and electronic music. Producer Pete Min’s Colorfield label is a kind of musical lab, where players are tossed into a room with synths they’ve never used before and let loose to create. McCabe is joined by a few guests (Paul Cornish on piano, Logan Kane on upright bass, Justin Brown on drums) on some tracks here, but for the most part it’s her show, laying down simple synth patterns and playing electronically modified reeds on top. On “Balloon Race” and two other pieces, she’s joined by drummer Justin Brown, who plays with trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire, Thundercat, and the hardcore band OFF! The keyboard melodies are deceptively simple, and her saxophone is filtered so it sounds like you’re hearing it in a dream; meanwhile, Brown’s drums combine a shifting beat with thundering outbursts. (From A Song To Sing, out now via Colorfield.)
Peter Brötzmann - "Part 1"
Saxophone titan Peter Brötzmann died on June 22, 2023 after a long battle with respiratory illness. His last live performances were at London’s Cafe OTO on February 10 and 11 of that year, and they’re presented in full on this two-CD set. He’s joined by a band he’d first assembled a decade earlier: vibraphonist Jason Adasiewicz, bassist John Edwards, and drummer Steve Noble. The latter two have long been one of the most powerful, hard-driving rhythm sections in UK and European avant-jazz, and they inspired Brötzmann to towering heights on two trio albums, The Worse The Better and Soulfood Available. But when Adasiewicz joined, the music became less of a blowout and much more beautiful. Each of the four sets performed by the quartet was a single long piece running between 32 and 39 minutes, and you can hear blues, swing, romantic balladry and Brötzmann’s trademark passionate cries throughout. RIP. (From The Quartet, out now via Otoroku.)
Sylvie Courvoisier/Mary Halvorson - "Bone Bells"
Pianist Sylvie Courvoisier and guitarist Mary Halvorson have been collaborating for almost a decade: their first duo album, Crop Circles, was released in 2017, and the follow-up, Searching For The Disappeared Hour, came out in 2021. Their work in this format has the stark beauty of chamber music, but it also veers sideways quite often, as Courvoisier’s prepared piano and Halvorson’s trademark pedal-driven squiggles take the music into strange and unexpected realms of pure sound. Each woman wrote four of the eight tracks; the title piece, which also opens the album, is by Halvorson, but Courvoisier delivers the showier performance, taking a slow and mournful ballad out into a realm of Tom Waits-ian sodden romanticism. The piano grows louder and louder, heavier and heavier, the melody seeming to step wrong then recovering as the guitar gently pings out comforting chords or short, gently picked figures, occasionally bending out of line. (From Bone Bells, out now via Pyroclastic.)
Yazz Ahmed - "She Stands On The Shore"
Trumpeter/composer Yazz Ahmed’s fourth album is the deepest and most immersive exploration of her Bahraini heritage yet. Partly inspired by a 90-minute suite, Alhaan Al Siduri (named for the character Siduri from the Epic of Gilgamesh), the album as a whole is an attempt to counter narratives about Arabic culture, about Arabic women in particular, as well as how Arabic music is used in stereotypical ways in western entertainment. This noble mission manifests in sweeping, heart-rending music, played by more than a dozen musicians, that blends traditional instrumentation, melodies, rhythms, and vocal performances with synths, modern production techniques, and structures rooted in jazz, electronic music and even hip-hop. The opening track, “She Stands On The Shore,” is drawn from Alhaan Al Siduri and features a vocal performance — many of the tracks on this album include vocals, a first for Ahmed — by legendary Egyptian/Belgian singer Natacha Atlas. This is stunning, dreamlike stuff. (From A Paradise In The Hold, out now via Night Time Stories.)
Vijay Iyer/Wadada Leo Smith - "Sumud"
The second duo album from pianist Vijay Iyer and trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith is a darker, more ominous work than its predecessor, 2017’s A Cosmic Rhythm With Each Stroke. I saw them perform together at ECM Records’ 50th anniversary concert, Smith pointing his horn at the floor and emitting razor-sharp notes that flew into the audience like diamond bullets as Iyer switched between acoustic and electric piano. On this album, there’s even more sonic variety than nine years ago. Some pieces have the brooding quality of modern classical, while “Floating River Requiem (For Patrice Lumumba)” is a deep, bluesy rumble. “Sumud,” a 12-minute soundscape, features gentle electronic melodies, over which Smith embarks on a virtuosic solo journey, but there are also piercing electronic tones throughout that scrape at your nerves. Recorded in summer 2024, this is dark music well suited to dark times, though its insistent beauty offers, yes, defiance. (From Defiant Life, out now via ECM.)
Branford Marsalis Quartet - "Spiral Dance"
The idea of covering another artist’s entire album mostly exists in rock and pop. My personal favorite is ’80s noise-rockers Pussy Galore’s version of the Rolling Stones’ Exile On Main St., which starts out faithful if raggedy but by the end has devolved into total fuck-this-and-fuck-you chaos. The Flaming Lips recorded Pink Floyd’s Dark Side Of The Moon with a bunch of guests. (It sucked, because they suck.) Angelique Kidjo totally transformed Talking Heads’ Remain In Light; Booker T. & The MGs covered the Beatles’ Abbey Road, but retitled it McLemore Avenue (a street in their native Memphis); and Laibach covered the Beatles’ Let It Be, but omitted the title track. I’m sure there are a bunch more — name as many as you can in the comments!
Full-album covers happen in jazz sometimes, too. We already discussed Nels Cline’s version of John Coltrane’s Interstellar Space at the beginning of this column, and in the late ’90s, Blue Note released a series of albums on which jazz artists covered rock and soul classics in their entirety. Guitarist Charlie Hunter interpreted Bob Marley’s Natty Dread, soprano saxophonist George Howard tackled Sly And The Family Stone’s There’s A Riot Goin’ On, saxophonist Everette Harp explored Marvin Gaye’s What’s Goin’ On, saxophonist Ronnie Laws took on the Isley Brothers’ Harvest For The World, saxophonist/producer Bob Belden reworked Carole King’s Tapestry, and guitarist Fareed Haque did Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s Déjà Vu.
Perhaps most infamously, Mostly Other People Do The Killing released Blue in 2014, on which they didn’t just cover Miles Davis’s Kind Of Blue — they recreated it note for note, perfectly mimicking each player’s tone and feel and even capturing the tape hiss and room sound, and used Jorge Luis Borges’ short story “Pierre Menard, Author Of The Quixote” as liner notes. Check it out; it’s wild.
Why are we talking about this? Because Branford Marsalis and his longstanding quartet — pianist Joey Calderazzo, bassist Eric Revis, and drummer Justin Faulkner — are making their debut on Blue Note with a full-album cover of Keith Jarrett’s 1974 release Belonging. That album was made with three Norwegian musicians: saxophonist Jan Garbarek, bassist Palle Danielsson, and drummer Jon Christensen. The group was dubbed Jarrett’s European Quartet, and made another studio album, 1978’s My Song, and a live album, 1980’s Nude Ants, before disbanding. (Two additional live albums, both recorded in 1979, were released years later.)
The two bands are very, very different from each other, to put it mildly. But hearing Calderazzo dive headlong into Jarrett’s blues- and gospel-derived melodies is a lot of fun, and hearing Revis and Faulkner take the somewhat genteel grooves played by Danielsson and Christensen and play them with air-strike impact is even more fun. They make the pieces their own, sometimes by stretching them way, way out (“Belonging,” once 2:15, is now 7:35) and other times by pulling them apart. “Long As You Know You’re Living Yours,” the song Steely Dan borrowed for “Gaucho,” was practically a locked groove on the Jarrett recording; this band turns it into a loose New Orleans shuffle, as Marsalis dices the melody into fragments. The opening “Spiral Dance” has a seriously hooky melody, which Marsalis plays with palpable joy, as the band bounces and thwacks it into place behind him. It’s a great start to a fascinating and highly enjoyable meditation on a jazz classic. (From Belonging, out 3/28 via Blue Note.)
OUTWARD BOUND
