Every year I pick someone who, in my op[inion, "wins" the Big Ears music festival. Usually, it's based on the most appearances, or at least the most appearances that I saw. Other years, it's someone who seems to have used the festival in some unique or creative way to make some sort of statement. Past winners have included pianist Brian Marsella and guitarist Marc Ribot. This year's winner has got to be guitarist Nels Cline.
Not only did I see The Nels Cline Singers at the Mill & Mine on Friday afternoon, but I also saw him with Jenny Scheinman's All Species Parade at the Bijou Theatre on Saturday night and with his new Consentrik Quartet at The Point, a church, on Sunday night. He also played with with 101 Audio Odyssey on Friday and then later that evening as part of the Suss-curated Across the Horizon series, but unfortunately I missed those sets (scheduling conflicts). He also participated in a couple panel discussions and record-signing events at the festival.
After I got back home from Knoxville and was relaxing in front of the television last night, I saw Nels sitting in with the house band on the Stephen Colbert Late Show. Busy man.
There are no vocalists in the ironically named Nels Cline Singers. The band consists of Nels on guitar, naturally, as well as punk-jazz saxophone iconoclast Skerik (Les Claypool, Garage a Trois, Bobby Previte), bass powerhouse Trevor Dunn (Mr. Bungle, John Zorn), longtime collaborator and drummer Scott Amendola (Bill Frisell, Charlie Hunter, Ben Goldberg) and Brazilian percussionist Cyro Baptista (Zorn’s The Dreamers, Caetano Veloso, Paul Simon). Keyboardist Brian Marsella, who's performed with Cyro Baptista’s Beat the Donkey and multiple John Zorn projects, was supposed to perform with the Singers at Big Ears, but Nels announced that Marsella was about to become a first-time father so his absence was understandable.
Among other tunes, the Singers performed a cover of Caetano Veloso's Segunda, which appeared on their 2020 Share The Wealth album.
“The inspiration was from hearing the Gal Costa studio version” of the song, Cline has said, referring to her 2011 album, Recanto. "I didn’t know anything about the lyrics so I asked Cyro’s wife, Eleonora Alberto, who offered to translate it. It turns out the lyrics are extremely poetic and timely. The song is essentially like a Black Lives Matter anthem. It’s about a black Brazilian ruminating on how people think that blacks are lazy and that the light-skinned people are the industrious people. And it incorporates the idea of White Monday, which is a Catholic holiday in Brazil. So Caetano uses this idea of the working man and the holiday and the legacy of black slavery in Brazil as this kind of potent, poetic statement.”
I also saw Nels perform on Saturday night with Jenny Scheinman's All Species Parade, which in addition to Cline and violinist Scheinman also included pianist Carmen Staaf, bassist Tony Scherr, and drummer Kenny Wollesen, as well as additional guitarists Bill Frisell and Julian Lage. That's one all-star lineup right there, a veritable pantheon of jazz-guitar gods.
Scheinman spent years in the NYC downtown music scene, both leading her own bands as well as working alongside artists ranging from Jason Moran to Brian Blade and Lucinda Williams to Lou Reed. She eventually moved back to her Pacific Northwest home in California's Humboldt County, where she was reawakened to the extraordinary biodiversity of the region, which inspired her to compose All Species Parade, a swinging double album of tunes reminiscent of classic jazz violinists like Stéphane Grappelli while informed by contemporary and post-modern jazz influences, and one of the best LPs of last year.
Nels Cline’s Consentrik Quartet, a new project but first conceived in the summer of 2019, performed Sunday night, the penultimate set I caught this year. Their debut eponymous album was released just two weeks ago.
In addition to Cline, the Consentrik Quartet includes drummer Tom Rainey, bassist Chris Lightcap, and the fine saxophonist Ingrid Laubrock. Cline first assembled the musicians six years ago in Brooklyn for a free-improv set at John Zorn’s venue, The Stone. A commission and grant from Philadelphia's Ars Nova Workshop allowed Cline to compose new music, with which he intended to tour. "And then the pandemic hit," Cline says. He estimates that he wrote half of this material during lockdown, first in Brooklyn and then in rural upstate New York, where he and his wife, Yuka Honda, relocated.
As befits the musicians involved, the Quartet's music is more forward-leaning and abstract than that of the Nels Cline Singers, making for a great set to lead up to the finale of the festival.
I'll unpack more of Big Ears in the coming days, but it seemed fitting to start the process with this year's festival champion.
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