New Song of the Day #23 - Nels Cline “The 23”

The hardworking Wilco guitarist introduces a new band, the Consentrik Quartet.

Where to even start with this guy? A wildly inventive and just plain wild guitarist, Nels Cline has been a member of Wilco for 20+ years, making his recorded debut with the Chicago band on 2005’s live Kicking Television, a Tom Verlaine to Jeff Tweedy’s Richard Lloyd, which more-or-less stayed the blueprint. But that’s not the half of it.

I witnessed Cline’s landmine country-punk Hendrix-ology for the first time back in the mid-‘90s, when he was part of the great Geraldine Fibbers. His jazzier pursuits have ranged from Angelica, a 1988 quintet project with saxophonist Tim Berne, to more free-form improv (1997’s Pillow Wand with Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore), while an assortment of records on Enja, Atavistic, and Cryptogramophone split the difference. There was an elegant duo set with Julian Lage on Mack Avenue, and a series Blue Note LPs, including 2016’s Lovers, an uneasy easy-listening double-LP of orchestral jazz re-imagining Great American Songbook titles (from Rodgers and Hart to, naturally, Sonic Youth).

Cline’s sideman CV is just ridiculous: albums by Rickie Lee Jones, Mike Watt, Lydia Lunch, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, Tinariwen, John Zorn, Yoko Ono, and various projects with Yuka Honda (another shapeshifter, who also happens to be his wife). Last month I saw Cline threading chopsticks between his strings and fretboard at the Bearsville Theater in Woodstock, NY, in a seizure-prone jam band trio with John Medeski and Joe Russo, rocking a roomful of greying hippies, some of whom dusted off their old noodle-dance moves. Suffice to say, Cline likes to play.

This track is something else again, from a Blue Note set due in March featuring his top flight new group, Consentrik Quartet, with saxophonist Ingrid Laubrock, bassist Chris Lightcap, and drummer Tom Rainey. Cline imagined something “a little more traditional” than his usual escapades, and I suppose it is: a morphing of supper club jazz, jam band groove, and extended technique punchlines. Relaxing, but not too relaxing.

It reminds me just a bit of John Zorn’s great Ennio Morricone tribute, The Big Gundown, another record that locates the strange in the familiar and doubles down on it. Around the same time, Zorn had been playing Ornette Coleman covers with Tim Berne, who appeared on Cline’s near-debut Angelica around the same time, too. So perhaps the connection makes sense and brings things full circle. Either way, Cline’s music hasn’t dimmed. Enjoy.