October 2, 2020
On November 13, Nels Cline will release his 3rd Blue Note album Share The Wealth, a dynamic double album featuring 10 swirling, evocative soundscapes including the epic first single “Beam/Spiral,” which is out today. On Share The Wealth, the sonic explorer and guitar renegade delivers a potent and provocative program of spontaneous, uncompromising music with an expanded edition of his long-running project The Nels Cline Singers featuring saxophonist and punk-jazz iconoclast Skerik, keyboard marvel Brian Marsella, bass powerhouse Trevor Dunn, longtime collaborator and drummer Scott Amendola, and Brazilian percussionist Cyro Baptista. The album can be pre-ordered now on vinyl, CD, or download. Fans who pre-order any format on the Nels Cline Store or Blue Note Store (US) will get access to an exclusive virtual album release event with Nels.
“This band has never even played a live gig together,” explains the intrepid improviser and Wilco band member. “So basically, the whole thing was an experiment. We recorded all these jams with the idea that I was going to take tiny fragments of them and create this kind of cut-and-paste, collaged, psychedelic record like an Os Mutantes record or something crazy like that. But when I listened back to these jams, I liked them so much that I wanted to keep them intact. And some of the most startling transitions, they’re not edits. They just happened in the course of these long improvisations in the studio, almost like magic.”
Recorded in just two days at The Bunker in Brooklyn with Cline and Eli Crews co-producing, Share The Wealth is by far Cline’s most fiercely experimental, cutting-edge Blue Note outing to date. “What little material I brought into the session we just learned and recorded it on the spot,” he explained. Of “Beam/Spiral,” Cline says “It’s got a little indie rock flavor in there, particularly in the second section. That’s just a classic Singers thing—some pounding eighth notes and big chords. But the more opened-ended first section really reminds me of early Weather Report or maybe Wayne Shorter’s Odyssey of Iska—things that I wasn’t intending but just came out.”
For his ambitious 2016 Blue Note debut, Lovers, Cline defied all expectations by delivering a sumptuous chamber-orchestra feast of mood music conducted and arranged by Michael Leonhart, and inspired by his muses Bill Evans, Jim Hall, Gil Evans, Jimmy Giuffre, Sonic Youth and Henry Mancini. For his 2018 follow-up, 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, bassist Scott Colley and drummer Tom Rainey on some heated collective improvisations across a wide range of moods.
