January 15, 2025
On March 14, Nels Cline will release Consentrik Quartet, the eponymous debut of the guitarist’s band comprising saxophonist Ingrid Laubrock, bassist Chris Lightcap, and drummer Tom Rainey. By turns swinging, grooving, bracing, mesmeric, and quietly stunning, the album spotlights the ensemble’s profound chemistry as well as Cline’s versatility as both a player and a writer. Consentrik Quartet is available for pre-order on Blue Note Store exclusive color vinyl, black vinyl, CD, or download. The album’s lead single “The 23,” a hard-driving piece with a hypnotic groove, is out today.
To be sure, Cline has range. Think of how he elevates the songs of Jeff Tweedy as a member of Wilco, or the diverse musical terrain he’s traversed on his albums for Blue Note Records over the past decade — from the gorgeous, sweeping mood music of Lovers featuring lush arrangements by Michael Leonhart to the wide-open sonic audacity of Share The Wealth, the latter featuring his longtime group The Nels Cline Singers.
Consentrik Quartet will be celebrating the album release with a performance at the Big Ears Festival in Knoxville, Tennessee on March 30. Cline will in fact be making four appearances at the festival this year including performances with eucademix (March 28) and Jenny Scheinman (March 29), as well as the first live show by an expanded version of The Nels Cline Singers (March 28) since the release of Share The Wealth in 2020. Additional tour dates will be announced soon, visit nelscline.com/shows for more info.
Consentrik Quartet also underscores his ceaseless appetite for and encyclopedic knowledge of great improvised music: Committed jazz observers might hear echoes of the guitar/sax frontline attack and programmatic scope of the John Scofield/Joe Lovano quartets, as well as the soft-spoken intensity and seamless blend of composition and improvisation that defined the various iterations of the Jimmy Giuffre 3. It also calls to mind adventurous 1960s Blue Note classics by Andrew Hill, Eric Dolphy, and others. In fact, Consentrik Quartet feels at times like a roadmap to Cline’s rich and considered palette of influences.
Of course Cline, a genial and generous man, can’t help but channel praise toward his empathetic bandmates. Compared to his often-otherworldly Singers, he explains, the Consentrik Quartet is “much more of a jazz group, if I dare use that word. I wanted to have the music reflect the players, and have the players come forth so that everybody is able to hear them and enjoy their lucidity and their mastery.”
To start, “I’ve got one of the greatest drummers on the planet in the band” in Tom Rainey, says Cline. Rainey, probably best known for his work with Tim Berne and Laubrock, his spouse, is that rare avant-gardist who can expertly color and improvise freely, then swing with old-school ferocity. Lightcap has earned acclaim for his original music and his collaborations with Regina Carter, Craig Taborn, Joe Morris, Matt Wilson, and other luminaries, and Cline praises the vast reach of his skills.
A superb avant-gardist whose music is equally challenging and alluring, Laubrock has left Cline dumbstruck over the years as a co-leader with Rainey and in groups like guitarist Mary Halvorson’s octet. “I heard her negotiating these perplexing chord changes in that band, with this amazing combination of great facility but also a kind of intimacy,” he says. “Honestly, when I listen to her playing on the Consentrik record, I’m consistently blown away. To me, it sounds like it’s her record because of how she shines.”
The pandemic figures heavily into the Consentrik story. Cline first assembled these musicians six years ago, for a free-improvisation set at the Brooklyn outpost of John Zorn’s venue The Stone. Soon after, Cline became aware of a commission and grant opportunity through the renowned Philadelphia arts organization Ars Nova Workshop, to compose new music and tour it in the Eastern U.S. “So I wrote about why I thought this was something I’d want to do, and I got the grant,” Cline says. “And then the pandemic hit.”
Cline estimates he wrote half of this material during lockdown, first in Brooklyn and then in rural upstate New York, where he and his wife relocated. “Suddenly,” Cline recalls, “we were enveloped in silence.” The respite afforded Cline the bandwidth to immerse himself in writing, and to think in a diligent way about what the Consentrik aesthetic could be. “Initially, for myself anyway, my sonic palette, I was looking at a more conservative approach—a little more traditional, I guess you’d say.” But Cline’s imagination, it turns out, is too fertile to be hemmed in by artistic parameters—even if he sets them himself. “Over time, I found myself looping and writing funkier grooving tunes,” he says.
This new release is also, in many ways, a love letter to the Brooklyn improvised-music scene that he became a vital player in well over a decade ago. And though he no longer lives in the borough, his allegiance to the creative musicians Brooklyn nurtures remains steadfast.
“My dream starting in the mid-’70s was to live in New York City and play music there,” Cline reflects. “I didn’t do it until 2009, when I met Yuka [Honda], and I thought, ‘Whoa—I guess I’m finally doing this.’ But I was very happy to be a part of this community. And I’m still happy about it.”
