Nels Cline

• Nels Cline

A true guitar polymath, Nels Cline’s recording and performing career spans jazz, rock, punk and experimental musics with over 200 recordings, including 30 as a leader, to his credit. His many accolades include being anointed by Rolling Stone as both one of 20 New Guitar Gods and one of the top 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time.

Born in Los Angeles on January 4, 1956, Cline and his twin brother, drummer Alex, formed a teenage rock band called Homogenized Goo, inspired by the groundbreaking psychedelic guitar work of Jimi Hendrix’s “Manic Depression,” Jeff Beck’s solo on The Yardbirds’ “Happenings Ten Years Time Ago,” George Harrison’s playing at the end of the Beatles “Strawberry Fields Forever” and Pete Townshend’s feedback squalls on “I Can See for Miles.” Later rock guitar influences for Nels included Steve Howe from Yes, Jan Akkerman from Focus and Roger McGuinn from The Byrds. “I just loved psychedelia — reverse guitar stuff, Indian-type drones, distortion and feedback. It all created a sense of the mystery and magic of sound that maybe set the stage for me to not to just play straight rock my whole life.”

Electric Miles Davis, specifically In a Silent Way, Bitches Brew, Live/Evil, On the Corner and Get Up With It, would open the door for Cline to some new musical horizons, along with late period John Coltrane, Pharaoh Sanders and Albert Ayler. Nels and his brother Alex would eventually come under the tutelage of such West Coast free jazz icons as multi-instrumentalist Vinny Golia and bassist-pianist-composer Eric Von Essen, who played duets with Cline on the guitarist’s first recording, 1980’s Elegies. There followed a series of recordings with New York avant-garde alto saxophonist Tim Berne (The Five Year Plan, 7X, Spectres) and with Berne’s mentor Julius Hemphill (1984’s live Georgia Blue) before Cline hit a prolific streak in the ‘90s with a string of releases by the Nels Cline Trio. The guitarist’s 1999 release, Interstellar Space Revisited (The Music of John Coltrane), his explosive duet with drummer Gregg Bendian, gained a lot of critical attention in the jazz world. He followed with a string of eight uncompromising releases through the 2000s for the Cryptogramophone label, including 2002’s debut by the Nels Cline Singers, Instrumentals, and their 2004 follow-up, The Giant Pin, that put him on the avant-garde map.

Cline’s profile was elevated to a whole other level after joining Wilco in 2004, subsequently appearing on 2005’s Kicking Television: Live in Chicago in 2007’s Sky Blue Sky, 2009’s Wilco (The Album), 2011’s The Whole Love, 2014’s Alpha Mike Foxtrot, 2015’s Star Wars, 2016’s Schmilco and 2019’s Ode to Joy. For his ambitious 2016 Blue Note debut, Lovers, Nels defied all expectations by delivering a sumptuous chamber-orchestra feast of mood music that was an unapologetically romantic paean to the Great American Songbook, inspired by his muses Bill Evans, Jim Hall, Gil Evans, Jimmy Giuffre, Sonic Youth and Henry Mancini. For his 2018 follow-up on Blue Note, Currents, Constellations, he pared it down to a quartet, dubbed The Nels Cline 4, and showcased a tight two-guitar interplay with his six-string partner Julian Lage on some heated collective improvisations across a wide range of moods. His 2016 double album debut on Blue Note, Lovers, was called “quietly ravishing” by The New York Times, “stunning” by Downbeat and “wildly inventive by Rolling Stone while his 2018 follow-up, Currents, Constellations, was called “vibrant, adventurous…a skronking, shredding, shapeshifting good time” by Stereogum. Joined by Skerik, Brian Marsella, Trevor Dunn, Scott Amendola, and Cyro Baptista, an expanded line-up of The Nels Cline Singers took things up a notch on 2020’s Share the Wealth. 2025 brings the release of Cline’s fourth Blue Note album Consentrik Quartet, the eponymous debut of his latest band comprising saxophonist Ingrid Laubrock, bassist Chris Lightcap, and drummer Tom Rainey.