The ever-prolific guitarist Nels Cline is back with his avant-garde aggregation, the Nels Cline Singers, for their seventh recording, first as a band and Cline’s third with the Blue Note label. You know Cline by now, as the guitarist for Wilco, and one who has appeared on over 200 recordings and over 30 as a leader. We last heard from him in a jazz sense with his Nels Cline 4 with fellow guitarist Julian Lage on 2018’s Currents, Constellations covered on these pages by this writer with this description – “This is spontaneous music made in the moment, shifting in tempo, dynamics, and melodies within the piece. Yet the music from this quartet is very accessible. Sometimes the beauty of The Nels Cline 4 lies in simple passages that lead to unpredictable exploratory excursions that keep the listener engaged.” The Nels Cline Singers, in its current iteration is a sextet that significantly takes that collection of words ‘unpredictable exploratory excursions’ up several notches on this 2-CD outing – Share the Wealth.
Joined by like-minded sonic explorers saxophonist Skerik (Critters Buggin, Garage a Trois, Bobby Previte), keyboard wizard Brian Marsela ( John Zorn, Cyro Baptista’s Beat the Donkey, Jon Madof’s Zion80), bassist Trevor Dunn (Mr. Bungle, John Zorn), longtime collaborator and drummer Scott Amendola (Bill Frisell, Charlie Hunter, Ben Goldberg), and Brazilian percussionist Cyro Baptista (John Zorn’s The Dreamers, Trey Anastasio, Caetano Veloso, Paul Simon),collectively the skronk, shred, shapeshift, and stretch out freely across the double disc. Note that each of these contributors has two words in the credits next to their specific instrument – “electronic enhancements.” Often the phrase “in the moment” is used rather casually but Cline states that this band has never even played a live gig together. The whole session was a series of jams originally designed as an experiment, not unlike electric Miles Davis, where Cline and co-producer Eli Crews would patch together pieces into a psychedelic record. Instead the jams, done over the course of just two days in Brooklyn, were kept intact and while some transitions may sound like edits, they are not. These are sessions that take their cues from not only electric Miles, but early Weather Report, Herbie Hancock’s fusion groups, and late period John Coltrane, Pharaoh Sanders, and Albert Ayler. (After all, it was Cline who in 1999 issued Interstellar Space Revisited: The Music of John Coltrane).
It’s difficult to assign an overall tone to the album, however. Epic, meandering psychedelic jams sit beside gorgeously layered emotive ballads giving the listener moments of true unabashed beauty mixed with distortion-laced atmospheric dense sonics that run the gamut between ferocious and soothing. Fortunately, Cline has provided his thought process in the liners, but you may want to listen first and take some guesses as to where he is headed. They do begin powerfully with an explosive take on Caetano Veloso’s “Segunda.” A drone-oriented piece, it gradually builds to an exciting peak with Cline’s distortion-laced guitar exchanging frenetic phrases with Skerik’s screeching tenor saxophone and Marsella on Fender Rhodes. The theme of the piece is akin to a Brazilian Black Lives matter anthem. The dynamic “Beam/Spiral” travels from the atmospheric opening, nodding in that portion to Weather Report, to an indie rock style, driven by Cline’s aggressive strumming and Amendola’s driving backbeat, with Skerik unleashing his aggressive tenor in the final minute of the piece. Those are just for starters.
The epic 17-minute, “Stump the Panel,” is unapologetically avant-garde, containing some riveting moments of Cline and Skerik exchanging conversation as Cline relates in the liners that his tastes in music really haven’t changed much since his high school days of listening to electric Miles and early Weather Report. That said, this is further out there. The other sprawling jam, “A Place on the Moon,” travels from peaceful ambient soundscape to swirling cacophony and back. With the directive being- “Okay, everybody…space!” the tune owes its some of its passages to the early fusion work of Joe Zawinul and Herbie Hancock. Think back to Miles’ In a Silent Way and Weather Report’s I Sing the Body Electric and you have the vibe.
The more atmospheric pieces such as the mournful ballad “Nightstand” and the closer, “Passed Down,’ are requisitely reflective and solemn as Cline wrote them as a personal response to a friend’s suicide. There are moments in both where Sherik has that special spiritual melodic saxophone tone akin to Pharaoh Sanders and Gato Barbieri. And, rather remarkably for two that have known each other for almost twenty years now, this is the first time Skerik and Cline have recorded together. Beyond the ballads mentioned, intimacy reveals itself on Cline’s sparse dobro feature “Ashcan Treasure,” in which he plays a National Dobro from the 1920s accompanied only by Marsella’s toy piano, augmented in the middle section with electronic looping, making it seem like three short pieces within the brief two and half minutes.
“Headdress” reveals the band’s contemporary jazzier side, influenced by Chicago guitarist Jeff Parker’s New Breed and the song “Touch In Mine” from Esperanza Spalding’s Little Spells. The distortion emanating from Amendola’s pedal board is described this way – “I wanted to do something really just slow and washy, like ‘drifting through a sea of amber’.” Again, Skerik puts out a gorgeous sound floats above the electronics. This mood changes abruptly with the wah-wah-laden punk-funk of “Princess Phone” recalling the electronic experiments of Miles Davis’ On the Corner with incendiary Rhodes adventuring by Marsella while the companion funk workout and the heavy 4/4 groove of “The Pleather Patrol,” featuring Dunn’s throbbing fuzz baselines and Amendola’s insistent backbeat, owes directly to P-Funk.
This is yet another indication that Blue Note is becoming increasingly edgy with contemporary artists. Give Cline credit as he has delivered three vastly different albums for the label – romantic chamber jazz, a dual guitar quartet, and now this adventuresome sextet. Headphones are clearly in order.
