Nels Cline Singers, 'Draw Breath' (2007)
At the end of Playing Changes is a list: The 129 Essential Albums of the Twenty-First Century (So Far). I organized these by year, and then alphabetically by artist name. I'll be running them down here, in that order. (No one appears more than once as a leader, though there’s ample overlap in personnel.)
To a sizable swath of the public, Nels Cline is best known as the chief guitar alchemist and pyrotechnician in Wilco. He has earned that reputation and then some, as anyone who’s seen the band over the last 15 years or so can attest.
But Cline is, of course, so much more than that. He’s an improviser to the core, with a creative track record that stretches back more than 40 years. Just over a decade ago, I profiled him for JazzTimes, making the point that “he’s about the same age as Pat Metheny, John Scofield and Bill Frisell, and like them he has carved his path through the modern-jazz labyrinth with an open mind and a personal style.”
Frisell spoke to me for that piece, and had this to say:
When I first met him, jeez, his fingers would just be flying all over the place. Just as a guitar geek, man, how do you do that? But now it goes so far beyond that, too. It’s something in his imagination that, for me, is what music is all about. And he’s integrated the whole extra-guitar thing, all the electronic stuff, to the point where it’s totally organic. It’s just, like, amazing.
Cline’s admirers run a gamut from noise-drawn experimentalists to hardcore guitar nerds, with acres of space in between. Two years ago, Jazz Night in America captured a performance by his “mood music” project, Lovers, made with Michael Leonhart. That’s yet another listening constituency.
So yes, there are myriad points of entry for Cline’s discography. When it came time to choose a selection for the 129 Essential Albums, I turned to Draw Breath — an excellent album by the Nels Cline Singers, his flagship band with drummer Scott Amendola and bassist Devin Hoff. The album was made and released in 2007, a few years into Cline’s tenure with Wilco. That fact doesn’t factor much into the sound of the album, except in the sense that he sounds exceptionally assured in every aspect of his sound.
Consider the vaulting anthem “Confection,” which explodes out of the gate, before an arco bass solo. (The go-for-broke character of this track makes it a bit of an outlier here; if it’s something you want to inject in your veins, allow me to recommend the Hedvig Mollestad Trio.)
In a capsule review of this album for The New York Times, I wrote that “‘Confection’ could sit companionably on a Sonic Youth album; ‘Squirrel of God’ is a stormy-turned-sunny rumination with percussion by Glenn Kotche, Mr. Cline’s colleague in Wilco. And given the various strains of abrasiveness on the album, it seems worth noting that the centerpiece is a glimmering waltz called ‘The Angel of Angels,’ one of the prettiest and most radiant offerings of Mr. Cline’s career.” I stand by that assessment, still. Seek out the album, if you haven’t, and see whether you agree.
Purchase Draw Breath at Amazon, or stream it on Spotify, Tidal or Apple Music.