This Saturday, May 20 marks the official debut of the Nels Cline Four. Cline will take the stage at New York City’s (Le) Poisson Rouge alongside fellow guitarist Julian Lage (the two previously recorded the Room record and continue to gig together as a duo) as well as Scott Colley (double bass) and Tom Rainey (drums). This is one of many projects on the horizon for Cline who will perform his Lovers album with 17 accompanists in Brooklyn on August 5 and also maintain a steady summer tour schedule with Wilco (on June 23, Wilco will open its Solid Sound Festival by performing an album selected by fans and in the following conversation, Cline also shares his personal picks).
Let’s start with the Nels Cline Four, in which you’re expanding on your collaboration with Julian Lage. How did this come about and what are you hoping to achieve?
Last summer I had a residency at the Stone, and one of the things that I did was this quartet. When Julian and I first met and started playing together it was one of the greatest gifts to my life—musically and personally—because of the kind of chemistry that we seem to have. It was magical right away, and it was challenging. At the same time, it has this kind of ease about it. Everything about it is marvelous, as far as I’m concerned.
But after a few months or year of playing, we thought “Gee, I wonder what it would be like to try to do this kind of stuff with a rhythm section?” Then we sort of fantasized about “Well who would the rhythm section be?” At that time, Julian was doing stuff with a laptop, in addition to his guitar playing when he was playing with Eric Harland, for example. I wondered, “Oh, will I use effects pedals, and do looping as I tend to do?” Later, I said, “Well, let’s try it with a rhythm section!” and so we did.
I believe Scott Colley had been saying “Hey, let’s play some music together” ever since I started hanging out with him one of these lunches with Jim Hall—they were called the “crony lunches.” I had known of Scott since he started in Los Angeles, where I’m from, although we were never pals back then. Then Tom Rainey’s one of my favorite musicians on the planet, and somebody I’ve played on and off with for a few years now. Julian had never really heard Tom but he played extensively with Scott. So, I just thought it was kind of a natural combination. I sounded Julian out on his thoughts and he thought it sounded great. The irony of this is I didn’t know if Scott and Tom had ever even played together, but it turns out that, in the ‘90s, they played hundreds of gigs together but hadn’t played together in the last few years. I didn’t learn that until we were at the Stone about to play our set. So I found that rather amusing, because we didn’t rehearse the music for the Stone, except for like 45 minutes before the show.
I’m trying to finish some more ambitious compositions to mix in with what I intend to be a lot of improvising with this quartet. I’ve also decided not to engage my looping, effects-laden guitar world with this music, so that it’s actually really pretty much a natural extension, in most regards, of the duo with Julian. I had to ask Julian—I don’t want this to affect our duo, because this is really under my name, and I’m writing the music, even though there’s gonna be a couple of cover songs involved. But he’s totally cool with it.
I want to develop a language—especially with the two guitars, but also as improvisers, as an ensemble—that’s very specific, and that means it’s gonna be really, really hard to do this band live very much. Nobody’s replaceable, really, so I’ll just have to do it for its own sake just like everything else I do and see what happens. We have some dates booked for Europe next winter, and I’m going to record the band after we do these two gigs—we play in Canada at the Victoriaville Festival, the day after the LPR gig. I’m just gonna call them demos, because I feel like as we continue, the language of the group will become more singular, and then maybe we’ll record again and I’ll put something together from the two sessions.
Can you talk a bit more about what you have in mind for repertoire?
I want it to be kind of a modernistic jazz group with tendencies toward impressionistic composing, the style of which I’ve been doing for a long time, which is in some ways inspired by composers like Ralph Towner, John Abercrombie and maybe to some extent also Joe Zawinul. We’ll investigate that balance between extemporaneous so-called free playing and some tightly structured melodic, harmonic material. That’s kind of what Julian and I do. The rhythm section in this case is so capable, and so skilled, and at the same time, can negotiate these areas with considerable coherence and ease, and I’m excited about what can eventually develop, particularly on the improvisational side, with these monster players. It’s also kind of low volume compared to some of the things that I’ve been involved in, which is refreshing. I also realized after I put this all together that everybody in the band is from California (laughs).
You mentioned Jim Hall crony lunches. How did you come to participate and what were they like?
I was interviewed for a movie about Bill Frisell by an Australian woman, Emma [Franz] and she arrived with a copy of the Bill Frisell/Jim Hall duo record, from Brian Camelio, for me to listen to as a gift—Brian from ArtistShare, who is a guitarist himself, kind of managed Jim in the later years. She said, “Brian Camelio said if you haven’t already, you should meet Jim Hall, because he lives a block from you.” I was living, at the time, on West 11th Street in the West Village, and he lived on West 12th Street, both of us between 5th and 6th Avenue. And he said “Brian saw your article in Jazz Times , ’10 Tracks by Jim Hall,’ and showed it to Jim, and here’s his information.” So, I wrote to him. I said, “Thank you for the CD,” and he wrote back saying, “Look, we have these lunches to try to get Jim out of the apartment every so often, at the end of your street. We’d love you to come to one of these and meet Jim.” And I said, “Oh, come on man. I’m not a real jazz guy or anything, I don’t know,” and he said, “Jim would love you to come.”
So, eventually it was schedulable, and Scott Colley, John Pondel, Steve LaSpina—you had all these people—Dave Binney, sometimes, Chris Potter, and eventually, Julian, would have lunch with Jim. I made a few of these. In fact, Julian and I, and Adam Rogers, did a birthday lunch, then five or six days later, Jim passed away. The most talking I ever did to Jim was at that lunch. He could walk really, really slowly back to his apartment, so he and I chatted on the way back. He would just ask me some questions, because I was pretty shy at these things. I would talk a lot to Adam, and people that I knew. But that’s what these were. They were organized by Brian Camelio to keep Jim in contact with his friends, and it was really pleasant. Jim was really lovely, and affable and funny. He loved corny humor, and a lot of these guys like Scott, and Steve, had played with Jim for years and years. So, it was really warm, and to be included in that at all was pretty marvelous.
When Julian finally came to one of these that’s when we met, and we instantly started chatting, and hit it off, and ended up playing, just improvising, right there in the living room on West 11th Street.
Last month you interpreted the music from your Lovers recording with a large ensemble in Los Angeles and San Francisco. You’re going to do it again in Brooklyn on August 5. What did you take away from those West Coast performances?
One thing I have to say is it’s a huge challenge for me. The Lovers music was intended as a recording, not as a live performance entity. The reason being two-fold: one is that it’s mostly low key, slower ballad-esque material, the other being that it’s all me, for the most part, playing on everything, because the architecture of it is based to some extent on records like Sketches of Spain [Miles Davis], or Stan Getz’ Focus, or records that feature one voice—in this case my voice on the guitar—on all the pieces. I don’t share space with many other soloists. For me, to do that live, pretty much goes against everything that I usually do or how I operate.
With that said, there’s the psychological challenge that was non-musical, in the case of particularly doing this at UCLA Royce Hall, where I had heard many a concert—quite life changing ones, in fact—growing up. I grew up really close to UCLA, and played gigs all around Los Angeles, and in California in general for decades. My parents both went to UCLA, and my brother works at UCLA. So, people came out of the woodwork to support what I was doing, and to check it out. It was a really overwhelming, in a non-musical kind of way (laughs).
I tried to really put a lot of that non-musical baggage out of my head in order to pull this off, because I was very nervous already about my possible inability, to pull this off adequately, because it’s musically challenging for me as well. I really screwed up one song, but overall, I think that we pulled it together. We realized that it’s playable music for all these monster musicians, but it really needs adequate rehearsal time to play 17 songs in the course of an evening, no matter how brief. So we need at least six hours of rehearsal time, and that’s another challenge, schedule-wise and budget-wise. So, it’s just a big monster of a project.
To what extent did the music reveal itself to you anew in that setting, if at all?
The commitment and support I got from all the musicians throughout the entire thing, from beginning to end, was staggeringly positive and strong. So that was a marvelous feeling for me, because many of these players, if not all of them, are people that I’ve looked up to and never thought I’d even collaborate with on any level. And then there’s my brother, who’s the only person I ever wanted to play this music because of his certain abilities he has. He’s played with me my whole life. But there are other people like Vinny Golia, who I’ve played with on and off since 1975-76, something like that. Then on the record, and coming up, there’s all these people like J.D. Parran, Steven Bernstein, Doug Wieselman, Erik Friedlander, all these people that I’ve listened to and loved forever.
So that that was one thing, musically speaking—I guess the fact that I could pull it off at all as an instrumentalist was kind of a revelation, because sometimes just blowing in a jazz matter over chord changes and not sounding like some kind of jazz-by-numbers guy is quite a challenge for me. I think I kind of pulled it off, for the most part. Also, I still love the arrangements; I still love the project. I was particularly pleased that some of the pieces I worried about being a little bit too abstract, or too odd or too dark, actually enlivened the program. And on “Lady Gabor” we really get to go for it, which kind of is fun, just to have a pan-modal droner that everyone can kind of almost rock out on. That really took on a life of its own too, so that was cool.
You mention your concern about the reception of this music. In that setting, how conscious were you of audience response and engagement?
I think in the past I’ve sort of poked fun at myself as being somewhat of a Vaudevillian, in that with pretty much everything I do, except completely free improvisation, I am thinking about the audience. I’m trying to create an experience for them. It’s not just for me. I want to have a balanced program; I want to have high highs, low lows, slow, fast, free, structured, loud, soft. I want to have all those things because that’s what I like. My music—if it’s about anything—is about this kind of balance between many different elements, sometimes stylistic elements that seem at odds with each other. Maybe that means I have no identity, but it is something I strive for. I do that as much for the audience as for myself.
In the case of Lovers, and actually all my recordings of my old stuff, I have to say that I’m really, for the most part, pleasing myself before everyone else, but I’m still thinking about who’s listening. Lovers was really created as an obsessive project pretty much for me. It’s something it seems like I’ve thought about forever.
But I worried about what the audience would think, or what they’re experiencing because I wanted it to be a compelling experience. I didn’t want it to be a me me me thing, which Lovers is in terms of the way it’s structured with me as the so-called voice out front of everything all the time. That’s not my normal impulse at all, as a musician. I don’t want to be the dude all the time. But that said, when I perform, I don’t look at the audience, even with Wilco for the most part. I pretty much play with the same focus, or the same mindset, when I’m playing for 40 people at the Stone as I do for 4,000 people with Wilco.
Speaking of Wilco, one final question: At Solid Sound this year, you’re going to open the festival by playing one studio album in its entirety, which will be selected by your fans. If you could pick, which album would you select?
Well, I’m pretty sure I know which one’s going to get voted for. I think it’s probably pretty obvious that Yankee Hotel Foxtrot will win, but maybe I’m wrong. I would say it would be interesting to do Being There, but I would probably pick The Whole Love. It would be fun to play Sky Blue Sky because it was the first record Pat and I did, because there are songs on that record that we love, that Wilco audience members don’t seem to be so in love with. So, it’s always fun to torment them with “Shake it Off” or something. I would love to play “Leave Me (Like You Found Me)” someday, more than once. I think we’ve only played that song live once, and I love that song. I think we all like a lot of the slower, more low-key sometimes mildly, if not phenomenally, depressing songs, but they don’t always make for an exciting live show, so they sort of get shunted to the back of the pile. By playing a record that was less popular, we would be able to re-attack and reassess some of these songs that haven’t been played hardly at all, which for me is a fun and exciting idea. To be honest, we play all those Yankee Hotel Foxtrot songs quite frequently, so it won’t be a challenge if they vote for that one, but it’ll still be some kind of an event.
For what it’s worth, I don’t think that Yankee Hotel Foxtrot will win, because I suspect that the people who are going to make the effort to vote will want to hear you guys go a little bit deeper into your catalog.
Maybe it’ll be Being There, I don’t know. I’m pretty sure it’s not gonna be The Whole Love though, or Wilco (The Album) . We’ll just have to see.
