The Nels Cline Singers - Draw Breath

The Nels Clines Singers, an instrumental trio with no vocal singers in sight led by guitar hero Nels Cline, recently released an excellent disc by the name of Draw Breath on the LA based cryptogramophone.

His band features Scott Amendola on drums and Devin hoff on bass. This release is higher profile for Nels if only because of his relatively new association with the rock band Wilco, who are based here in Chicago and recently released their first disc with Mr. Cline on guitar, making Nels somewhat of a local celebrity on the indie scene (Wilco's drummer, Glenn Kotche appears as a special guest on Squirrel of God). He played a stirring set with other local guitar hero Jeff Parker last year at the indie-Pitchfork Music Fest and has a high visibility amongst the young crowd due to his relationship with Wilco.

A quote from Mr. Cline: “I like to joke—and it’s not really a joke—that all my records tend to include the same ingredients. There’s free improvisation along with structured composition, investigation of sound along with traditional harmony, and subtlety along with bombast.”

Draw Breath opens with Caved-in Heart Blues, a piece that is more on the subtle end of the subtlety-bombast axis, consisting of one extended trip through a I-IV-V-I blues form that takes the entire song to complete. Dirge like in tempo and mood, the song features Mr. Cline's baritone guitar and Scott Amendola's drums to create the heavy feel of the piece, up until about 3/4 of the way through when the V chord peaks with a brief psychedelic excursion with electronics and lap steel. For the final trip through the I chord he returns to baritone guitar and drums to end up back where he started. It's an intriguing pick for the album opener, and after several listens to the whole album I'm still trying to decide what effect Nels was going for by putting it up front.

Attempted is a more jazz oriented tune with a head that is played by the entire trio, with Scott Amendola contributing punctuated drum accents that really bring out the melody. The solos are really group oriented with lots of interaction that makes you forget that it's a guitar trio with a guitar out front, eliminating any tendency to associate the format with the rock sounds of bands like Cream or The Jimi Hendrix Experience.

A word about Nels Cline's tone: it's certainly rock influenced, especially his distorted town that is more distortion and less overdrive, and there are hints of the Frisellian influence both in terms of tone and approach to the music. However, for all the looping and penchant for guitar stomp boxes that Bill Frisell has, I think Nels out-effects him.

Nels in response to a question about his use of effects pedals: "I just hear lots of sounds and colors. These sounds and colors in my head are compelling to me both emotionally and intellectually. Besides, I learned long ago that I seem to have a weird aptitude for using them. And yes, they do mess up one's sound. But then again, I just started equating tone and the proper equipment a few years ago! Before that i was just trying to play notes I liked, I had virtually no scientific "tonemeister" mentality. Being allowed to age and grow is indeed a blessing!"

I suppose influence is the wrong word to use in discussing Frisell and Cline considering the two guitarists emerged at the same time, both making their recorded debuts in 1979; it's more that I tend to associate some of his musical devices and tones in the instrumental music/jazz context with Mr. Frisell, but that's probably due to the fact that I was exposed to him before I heard Nels Cline.

Confection is by Nels' own admission, a "bit of a trifle" that reflects his penchant for writing an "instrumental hit." I love it. I'm never one to shy away from guitar pyrotechnics and Nels provides it in spades. It's a rocker with a loose punk vibe and intensity that often pervades Nels' playing regardless of context. It's interesting to frame this track alongside such delicately beautiful acoustic musings as Recognize I and II and the electronic textural sound odyssey of An Evening At Pops or Squirrel of God, all of it coming from Nels Cline and his musically malleable trio. Then again, I listen to and make all kinds of music myself, so I don't find it particularly odd, and I personally enjoy the aesthetic he's woven together.

From Mr. Cline himself: "Increasingly over the years I’ve lived what is essentially a double life—to such an extent in the earlier days that I almost quit playing, because I couldn’t reconcile my impulses to make huge amounts of sound playing rock with my desire to play music of great sophistication and subtlety in the classic jazz way."

Reconciling musical impulses is an interesting way of framing an approach to musical creativity. I don't know why anyone needs to pick sides.

The guitar is such a loaded instrument whenever anyone picks it up. The phallic rock associations are impossible to escape, and in the jazz world the tone-rolled-off lack of treble sound is cliche to the point of absurdity. Then come along musical polymaths like Nels Cline who absorb and process all musical influences in a way that makes it all uniquely Clinesian when it comes out of his guitar.

Draw Breath is the kind of record that makes you wonder if you're still listening to the same album from track to track due to the diversity of musical material approached by the trio. Eclecticism like that can sometimes result in a lack of flow for the album listening experience, but I find the variety on this album to be refreshing rather than jarring. This is an excellent disc that I can see I will continue to get a lot of mileage from in the future. As always with musicians who crossover into the popular realm, I hold out hope that a Wilco fan might pick up this disc and be tempted to delve into the rest of Mr. Cline's music, in the process discovering the rich musical world that awaits them in the realm of improvisational music.