The Nels Cline Singers - Share The Wealth

2020 release

For his third Blue Note release, Share The Wealth, sonic explorer and guitar renegade Nels Cline delivers a potent and provocative program of spontaneous, uncompromising, and ultimately compelling music with an expanded edition of his long-running project The Nels Cline Singers. The man whom DownBeat called “an epoch-defining performer and composer” is joined by saxophonist and punk-jazz iconoclast Skerik (Critters Buggin, Garage a Trois, Bobby Previte), keyboard marvel Brian Marsella (John Zorn, Cyro Baptista’s Beat the Donkey, Jon Madof’s Zion80), 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 (John Zorn’s The Dreamers, Caetano Veloso, Paul Simon). Together they revel in swirling, evocative soundscapes brimming with ferocious skronking and uninhibited stretching on this dynamic album.

“This band has never even played a live gig together,” explains the intrepid improviser and secret weapon of the rock band Wilco. “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.”