I don't have many guitar heroes (mostly with me it's songwriter heroes and drummer heroes and producer heroes), but if there's any living guitarist I worship, it's Nels Cline. I first got hooked on him in the mid 90's when he was running with Mike Watt and the Geraldine Fibbers and Sonic Youth, and have followed him through countless more obscure projects, but this year has been an interesting one, with him joining Wilco a few months ago. All About Jazz recently ran a biiiig feature on Nels that covers the Wilco situation pretty well, among other things. Their latest album was recorded before he joined, so he's only been touring with them so far, but there've been implications that he's more than just a touring guitarist, and the first Wilco song with Nels in the lineup was recently released on the Spongebob Squarepants OST (which has got to be the weirdest entry in the lengthy Nels Cline discography since...well, that Blue Man Group album he played on). I've never really been into Wilco (I think I listened to Summer Teeth a couple times and even as an oversensitive teenager dismissed it as a lyrical pity party), and I dunno if his involvement would motivate me to check out their next album, but I am glad he's finally got a gig that will pay his bills and probably help him bankroll his next round of projects. I don't know if it will give his own work a lot of exposure, though. His own brand of noise and improv is not too far removed from jazz, and is pretty out of step with the Wolf Eyes school of noise that gets hype these days.

What I'm excited about, though, is that he's still got plenty of his own stuff as a bandleader and a collaborator coming down the pike while he's on the road with Wilco. He's always got a steady stream of releases, probably about half a dozen a year, but just in the past month alone, 3 albums he plays on have come out, 2 of which I've snapped up already and may be fighting it out for a spot or two on my year-end top ten. His current touring trio the Nels Cline Singers just released their 2nd album, The Giant Pin, which is an improvement on the first album, Instrumentals (which was no doubt titled to clear up any confusion about the tongue-in-cheek Singers name). Still, I don't know if I'm feeling the Singers as much as his '90's trio, the Nels Cline Trio, or some of the one-off projects he's done in the past few years like Destroy All Nels Cline and The Inkling. The Singers do have good chemestry, though, and they were good the one time I saw them live. But like most Nels projects, they very rarely make it out to the east coast, touring mainly in and around his native California.

The other one I copped recently is Volume 3 in Atavistic's "Out Trios" series, Ash and Tabula by Nels Cline/Andrea Parkins/Tom Rainey. I'm not generally as interested in Nels's improv collaborations as I am with his stuff as a bandleader or writer, but I made a point to pick this one up because I wanted to hear more of Andrea Parkins, who was the highlight of the show I saw a couple months ago on the last night of the High Zero Festival Of Experimental Improvised Music here in Baltimore. She plays an electronically-processed accordian, which she gets some wild and not at all accordian-like sounds out of (her cousin is Zeena Parkins, who plays an electric harp and has also collaborated with Nels). So her and Nels together with a drummer is a pretty shit-hot combination, and sometimes they lock together in ways that are pretty impressive for a record that was "spontaneously composed".

Labels: Mike Watt, Nels Cline

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 30, 2004 at 11:31 PM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.