It’s hard to imagine that Nels Cline, longtime Wico member, leader of his own groups, and a guy who is often cited as one of the greatest guitarists of all time, once nearly gave up his instrument. As he told American Songwriter in a recent interview, the idea that he had to sort of declare what kind of music he would represent going forward was bringing him down.
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“I don’t know why I felt this way, maybe it’s my neuroses or something about the zeitgeist at the time, but I felt like I had to decide between electric and acoustic guitar, between jazz and rock and noise and whatever else you want to call these things,” he says. “And it was driving me crazy. At one point I thought I should just stop playing guitar and play acoustic bass. Thank God I didn’t decide to do that. I’d have to cart that thing around.”
It was only when he let go of that notion, trusted his instinct, and began finding like-minded musicians that he found an invigorating new career path. “I just decided I would follow any impulse that was natural to me and that would make me feel like I was doing something decent, aesthetically, compositionally or whatever,” Cline says. “In so doing, I had to find people who could play more than one aesthetic. I’ve never really been interested in moving from one genre to another. It was all supposed to be a seamless outpouring from my brain or heart.”
That outpouring is evident on Share The Wealth, Cline’s newest work with the collective The Nels Cline Singers (this time around featuring Cline with saxophonist Skerik, keyboardist Brian Marsella, bassist Trevor Dunn, drummer Scott Amendola and percussionist Cyro Baptista.) The sprawling double album intermingles moments of sparse beauty with sections of cacophonous chaos, often within a single track. Each of the ten pieces, a few of which threaten the 20-minute mark, take the listener on a fascinating journey through Cline’s myriad influences.
“This combination of sparse and dense, heavy and wistful/romantic, it’s been there from the beginning,” Cline says of his output with the Singers (who, of course, don’t sing anything.) “It’s just what I do. The aesthetic of this record really doesn’t stray very far from all the fascinations I was investigating as a teenager when I was in high school. I’m pretty sure that I’m a better musician now than I was then. All this combination of freedom and structure and the instrumentation itself, including the presence of Cyro Batista doing this kaleidoscopic percussion, harkens back to music that my twin brother Alex and I and a few friends were listening to back in high school, like Weather Report and Miles Davis and Herbie Hancock and even King Crimson.”
“These were powerful influences not just from recordings. We were able to hear all those bands play. Thank goodness for all-ages shows. When you experience something as a young person, it tends to really resonate with you for a long time. These things have never really disappeared from my inner musical architecture or my sonic realm.”
With Share The Wealth, Cline originally intended to take some of his original compositions, add in improvised pieces from the Singers, and cut and paste them together into a kind of pastiche. “I was thinking along those lines until I got back to my apartment and started listening to what we improvised,” he explains. “There were no guidelines other than beats per minute and, on the piece that ended up being ‘A Place On The Moon,’ I just said to everyone ‘space.’ And then we just let it go, because we’re in the digital world, burning zeros and ones. We didn’t have to burn reel-to-reel tape.”
“Some of the stuff is pretty long. There was no pressure to do anything stunning or fancy, because it was going to be raw material. That’s how I saw it in my mind and that’s how I explained it to my comrades in the Singers. I think maybe that lack of pressure and maybe, more significantly, the improvisational abilities of the gentlemen in the ensemble, and a kind of chemistry that originated almost immediately, created these improvised stretches that I found to be really satisfying listening, often compelling, and sometimes with really startling transitions that sound like they were cued or structured in some way, but were not.”
What’s striking about Share The Wealth is how seamlessly it transitions between Cline’s original ideas and the musicians’ flights of fancy. “Some of my compositions do have a rigid or didactic quality,” he explains. “The first single, ‘Beam-Spiral,’ is both. It begins with a compositional variation on what comes later, just basically a hypnotic repetition of a couple of chord progressions. It builds and builds. The variations are interspersed with completely improvised areas. It’s a combination of me giving very specific instructions in some areas and then giving virtually none in others, because I’m very lucky. I get to play with all kinds of talented individuals, in whom I have great trust. As such, I don’t try to rein them in too much.”
“It’s easy for me to have that trust. Because, to be honest, I feel like most of the time I’m playing with people who are better than me. I’m lucky to have met quite a lot of great musicians and even played with a few who I grew up admiring to amazing degrees, if not idolizing. I don’t want to overwork the humility angle here, but I do feel humble in the presence of great musicianship and I do surround myself in my own groups with people I know have certain abilities that fit with my sensibilities. I don’t have to worry about what they’re going to do. I’m not realty rigid about this stuff. I’ve never auditioned a musician in my life to play with me.”
Song titles like “Stump The Panel” and “Pleather Patrol” display a lighter touch than you might anticipate accompanying such accomplished playing. In fact, Cline pushes back at the idea that the kind of instrumental music he makes with the Singers in any way impenetrable. “Having done primarily instrumental music with a great emphasis on improvisation since I was a teenager, I do see, in the US, people who think that this type of music is just for musicians,” he explains. “They don’t realize that they’re part of the conversation when they’re hearing it in a live performance. In a live setting, when people go to listen to jazz, those who are clued into the language realize that they’re being told a story in a way. And when they react, they’re being told something, and their response is being felt, if not directly heard, by the musician. It’s an exchange.”
“If people allow themselves to experience this music, either in a jazz sense as a conversation or even just letting it wash over them and taking the ride, it’s not really so abstruse or exclusive. In fact, it can be quite inclusive as long as one is not threatened by feeling like you have to know something.”
Now Cline is avidly hoping that he can perform the music from Share The Wealth soon for a live audience. In fact, he’d be thrilled with just about any live performance.
“Dude, I’m dying,” he says with a laugh about his inability to play live. “If there’s one thing I can generalize about myself, other than certain personality quirks, it’s that I really, really like to play. Music and art have saved me in my life. I’m a guy who when I’m out on tour with Wico, I just love doing sound checks. As soon as we start playing, I’m in my element.”
