CD REVIEW: Nels Cline’s DIRTY BABY (UPDATED*)

A few weeks ago I had a brief if pleasant conversation with the novelist Steve Erickson where we marveled at the recent spate of superlative film soundtracks: Jonny Greenwood’s score for There Will Be Blood, Daft Punk’s for Tron Legacy, Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’ for The Social Network, The Roots' for Night Catches Us. I found myself throwing Nels Cline’s score for David Breskin and Ed Ruscha’s DIRTY BABY project into the mix even though the music does not accompany moving images but static ones. And with poetry to boot! Yet growing up in the shadow of Hollywood must have somehow seeped into Cline’s radar: this is perhaps his most cinematic piece of music and indicative of a sweeping and vision he’s only been hinting at. But now it’s official: Nels Cline wants to be a great American composer.

Even in his liner notes to the beautifully packaged objet d’art 2-CD box set, Cline makes references to modern musical cranks like Morton Feldman, Carl Ruggles and Charles Ives. Yet he declares in his lengthy liner notes that "a project like this unavoidably approaches (and yet naturally enough avoids) the very idea of SOUNDTRACK” – partly because some of the music has been improvised (yet so seamlessly incorporated into the composed bits that I defy you to notice where one ends and the other begins) and partly because of Cline’s embracing of the pastiche techniques used by John Zorn (Naked City) and Frank Zappa (Uncle Meat). Where the majority of songs on Cline’s albums with his regular group the Nels Cline Singers (bassist Devin Hoff and Scott Amendola form the spine of the 15-member DB orchestra) jump from one single genre to the other – something that Cline himself has admitted in interviews has become somewhat predictable – Cline does a more successful “mash up” of myriad influences. Punk, avant-garde jazz, film noir, doom metal, Middle Eastern drone, country-western, electronica, groove – all are mixed together more organically. Similar to other soundtrack composers like Michael Danna (The Sweet Hereafter) and Brian Keane (The Way West), Cline draws parallels between conflicting forms and comes up – despite the America-centric settings of Ruscha’s images and Breskin’s poetry – with a result that evokes a sort of borderless global iPOD.

The Cool School: Ed Ruscha, David Breskin, Nels Cline

It’s no wonder the guy grew up in Los Angeles. Cline, along with Ruscha, evokes the city’s uneasy codependency between the high and the low forms of artistic expression. In a 1999 interview, Cline stated that growing up in the city during the ‘60s explosion of psychedelic music and irreverent Pop Art led him to develop into “the king of aesthetic dichotomies until I was fully an adult. Everything for me has been an internal war between high and low art, between rock and jazz…I could never merge them until I was almost forty years old.” Where his twin brother Alex became a gifted visual artist and mercurial jazz drummer, Cline has since worked to incorporate live improvised music with improvised art, such as his longtime live collaborations with L.A. painter Norton Wisdom, both in the duo Stained Radiance and the punk-groove-jazz collective Banyan.

Enter David Breskin, a renaissance mensch whom Cline knew for his music journalism and production credits with ex-Cecil Taylor sideman Ronald Shannon Jackson, gutarist Bill Frisell and the aforementioned Mr. Zorn. In 2002, Breskin had produced RICHTER88, an art/poetry/musical hybrid featuring the abstract art of Gerhard Richter and the music of Mr. Frisell. This caught the eye of Mr. Ruscha, who invited Breskin to tackle some of his lesser-known paintings from the ‘80s and ‘90s. Breskin selected 33 prints each from two different series – The Silhouettes (murky chiaroscuro images of Western expansion: tilted merchant ships, baying wolves, road signs, spiny cacti) and Cityscapes (abstract bars and strips). Although Ruscha is mainly known for his word-based paintings of American roadside signage, Breskin chose to go nonverbal: both sets of paintings are referred to as the “dumb blocks” (Ruscha’s term) or “censor strips” (everyone else’s). Breskin also chose to include his own poetry in the concise and airtight form of Arabic ghazals. Breskin then approached L.A. super-producer and multi-instrumentalist Jon Brion (Paul Thomas Anderson’s go-to soundtrack guy for Boogie Nights, Magnolia and Punch-Drunk Love) but Brion begged off after pleading unfamiliarity with Ruscha’s work. Cline seemed the next natural leap: he and Brion had been collaborating for years, including charmingly esoteric jam sessions at L.A.’s Largo club. “David did give me clues to what he wanted for the music,” Cline admits in his liner notes, “but no specific direction save for the initial Side A brief: create one long piece of music, not a collection of discrete songs.”

SIDE A, "NELSAANISQATSI": Breskin’s task was a little more specific: he wanted Cline to score no less than “a sort of shaggy-dog time-lapse history” of Western expansion: “The primordial New Land is “discovered” by European interlopers and settlers; they push westward; land and slaves are purchased, fences go up; cities are created, the land is altered in extreme; proximity and increased ease of communication beget, ironically, isolation.” Quite a chunk to bite off – that’s about 6,000 years, folks! – yet its remarkable how Cline calls on his music-nerd encyclopedia of a brain and yet makes music that sounds so eerily original. Side A begins with deceptive simplicity: back and forth acoustic strumming by Cline and acolyte Jeremy Drake, soon joined by Bill Barrett’s shape-shifting chromatic harmonica and Devin Hoff’s searching bass, calling up images of bubbling tidepools and oozing magma. Barrett’s harmonica mixes with Glenn Taylor’s understated pedal steel guitar before Wayne Peet’s atmospheric Hammond organ flickers over a plodding horse-hoof pulse. (The same BPM is maintained throughout the 42 minute cut). It’s an epic yet modern cowboy opera—music both familiar and otherworldly.

Cline’s adherence to his improvised-music roots yields some fascinating direction for his musicians: at one point, Cline cues them to improvise using only the chord-structure used by Nashville session players.* By the fourth mini-suite, guest Jon Brion (whom Cline managed to get to sit in) weighs in with a vintage EMI Synth, creating circular squiggles on which one can almost see the time lapse growth of the digital city like a metastasizing computer chip, eating up the desert as it expands. Despite Cline’s claim in his liner notes that “I pretty much messed up any literal timeline,” this could be the story of Los Angeles, our progression to “the end of the line.” Any doubt of this is smershed by the closing track: A terrifying primeval march/dirge, where Hoff’s bass growls and stomps like some slag-created monster oozing out of a cadmium-polluted urban nightscape – all doom, all the time. It’s a scary experience on headphones, summoning up dinosaurs and Maseratis alike drowning in the La Brea Tar Pits, both making distress calls in their own language. This is some of Cline’s most upsetting music – that is, until a banjo and a mini-guitar begin to rise in the background, stilling the ugliness and making it go to sleep with a choker hold.
*From Nels: "In Nashville songs are easily played/learned/recorded/arranged by just naming the chords as they appear in the diatonic scale - I - vii. So in C I is C, IV is F, vi is A minor, etc. Sometimes onstage playing little-known material a musical director will use numbers of fingers, sometimes charts are just these numbers."

SIDE B, "MISSION ACCOMPLISHIFIED": Breskin’s idea for DB's second half was, as he told an interviewer, “a kind of shooting gallery in which to set the Iraq conflict — back to the 'cradle' of that civilization, the nearly-destroyed nursery.” His direction for Cline was a bit more constrictive: 33 pieces, each no longer than a minute-plus. Cline came up with, in his words, “more than a string of amuse-bouche”: a sound-byte rendering of America’s wars in the Middle East. And it’s amazing how many far-reaching sounds and influences Cline throws into the mix and mashes together with great care. Track 6 (“DO AS TOLD OR SUFFER”) could be a race-car engine, or someone imitating a race-car engine by spitting though tightened lips, or even one long cartoonish flatulence. On Track 9 (“HEY YOU WANT TO SLEEP WITH THE FISHES?”), a bebop bass line is supported by a woozy, art-damaged surf guitar reverb. Some tracks punch you in the face before signing off abruptly. The Cagean Track 10 (“A COLUMBIA NECKLACE FOR YOU”) is more silence than sound. Track 11 (“NOTE WE HAVE ALREADY GOT RID OF SEVERAL LIKE YOU”) is of a lyrical piece with the Gil Evans/Miles Davis collaborations of the late ‘50s. Track 15 (“I’M GOING TO LEAVE MORE NOTES AND I’M GOING TO KICK YOUR ASS”) is chugging metal mixed with a free-jazz horn freakout. Even in these small pieces, Cline approaches the anthemic spheres of great FILM composers like Jerry Goldsmith and Ennio Morricone. Even he is forced to conclude in his liner notes: “Maybe it IS a soundtrack after all…” Ah Nels. Long may you waiver!

*UPDATE (11/24/10): Listen to NPR reporter Andrea Raymond's profile of the DIRTY BABY project.

ANGEL CITY JAZZ FESTIVAL 2010: Demokratic Vistas

After a two-day break, the Angel City Jazz Festival returned for its second leg on Thursday night with an emphasis on interdisciplinary collaboration—mainly between music and the visual arts. A bit of this was hinted at the Royal/T Café last week with the dinner/music/dance/video combo of the memorable “Cookin’ It Up” show, but both Thursday and Friday nights really drove home the interaction between  images and how artists respond to them. At the helm of the musical side of things were two L.A. composers whom I have been thinking about in the same breath a lot lately for their similarities: the festival’s keynote guitarist Nels Cline and the festival’s unofficial first lady, pianist Motoko Honda. Both conjure whole orchestras out of their respective instruments; both are musically omnivorous; both don’t hide behind their gadgets but utilize them improvisational devices in the bigger mix; both aggregate punk-rock energy with studious avant-garde discipline; and both have no limits to their talent.

Thursday night was the second buzz-worthy event since Henry Grimes on opening night: The LACMA-sanctioned premiere of DIRTY BABY, the picture/poetry/music “triologue” between L.A. badass painter Ed Ruscha, San Francisco-based producer/poet David Breskin and Mr. Cline. (A bethumbed review copy of the $125 coffee-sized tome with attendant “DIRTY NELS” CD sat like a giant doorstop in the museum bookstore.) Before beginning his readings, Mr. Breskin, a suitably intense and prickly gentleman with a lethal-looking shaved head who took very loud and elongated pulls on his bottled water, commented about how the boxes of fresh copies of the DIRTY BABY book were seized at U.S. Customs after being shipped in from its Italian printers; apparently, the book’s title scrawled all over the boxes convinced authorities they had hit the motherlode of confiscated child pornography. Oh Ed, still throwing people for a loop after 50 years!

David Breskin makes cellphone owners fear for their lives

(photo courtesy of Myles Regan)

The show was split into two parts, the first of which was a less successful melding of the involved art forms than the second. Mr. Breskin began – after acknowledging the evening as being the 55th anniversary of the reading of Allen Ginsburg’s Howl – with nearly a half hour hour of continuous short readings of his tart, ironic ghazals (sort of like Arabic haiku with refrain). In the book they are combined with 66 prints of Ruscha’s little-seen “dumb block” paintings from the 1980s and 1990s: dreamy, murky silhouettes with those punk-rocky black-censorship bars over where text would normally be.

The DIRTY band, first set (from left): Wayne Peet, Jeremy Drake, Danny Frankel, Glenn Taylor, Scott Amendola, Todd Sickafoose, Nels Cline, Bill Barrett

(photo courtesy of Myles Regan)

Cline followed with no less than, in Breskin’s words, “a time-lapse history of 6,000 years of Western Civilization.” His dream nonet of Left Coast players (whom Breskin dubbed "The People of the West") rose to the challenge with the stunningly epic and ambitious 42-minute title cut, which split itself into at least five different mini-suites that ranged from white squalls of noise to sweeping lyrical expanses that recalled composers like Virgil Thomson and Aaron Copeland. (It was Cline’s own personal There Will Be Blood soundtrack—the title of which is even repeated in one of Breskin’s ghazals.) The standout instrument of the first set was the prairie-ghost whisper of Bill Barnett’s chromatic harmonica. This, taken with Glenn Taylor's delicate pedal-steel shadings, framed the suite as some sort of strange and fragmented Western opera.

Maestro!

(photo courtesy of Myles Regan)

In the second set, Breskin’s terse readings turned bragging and hostile (“You Will Eat Hot Lead,” “I Thought I Told You That We Won’t Stop” “You Talk You Get Killed”) as he tackled the cracked mirror of America’s wars in the Middle East. These were interwoven more organically with Cline’s short bursts of bliss and vinegar. Besides electric guitar, Cline used what appeared to be a series of smaller and smaller acoustic guitars, including one that looked and sounded like a Cuban armónico, that lent the score a waft of Middle Eastern incense.

Lady about to attack her piano: Motoko Honda

(photo courtesy of Myles Regan)

Friday night’s marriage of imagery and music was no less epic, despite the fact that there was only one musician onstage instead of fourteen. Pianist and sound sculptress Motoko Honda preluded the premiere of Steven Elkins’ frequently poetic documentary The Reach of Resonance (think Fast, Cheap and Out of Control with musical mavericks) by stating her confusion at being asked to compose a piece inspired by the film. “I am mostly an improviser,” she said almost apologetically before sitting down for a furious and anarchic 20-minute tour de force in which she practically crawled inside the instrument. Mixing lyrical, almost George Winston-like etudes with a prepared technique I can only describe as “flossing" -- slipping a fishing line around the piano strings and moving them back and forth rapidly to create a sound not unlike a methed-out bee swarm  -- she beautifully refracted the film’s mind-bending investigations into the outer reaches of musical inspiration, or what composer Jon Rose, one of the film’s four subjects, tellingly labels “sonic terrorism." Mmm, not a bad buzzword for the ACJ festival as a whole.

THE REACH OF RESONANCE SNEAK PEEK:

Our apologies to Mr. John Abercrombie, who closed out the festival Saturday night with his Quartet. The Beast took ill and couldn't swing it, but here are some lovely and candid shots of the master at work:

From left: John Abercrombie, Joey Baron, Thomas Morgan, Mark Feldman

(all photos courtesy of Myles Regan)

Nels on the March

He may be decamping soon for Neuva York, but wonk-wizard extraordinaire Nels Cline continues to conquer as many stages and studios as he can before senility starts in. Fresh from his memorable stint at Wilco’s Solid Sound Festival last month in the sweltering heat of BAHston, where his personal ‘Stompbox Station’ installation and irradiating set with his punky little instrumental trio The Nels Cline Singers were obvious highlights, Sir Nels will be dropping back in these here hills early next month on a number of errands for the ear.


Professor Cline demonstrates his Magick Stompbox Musicquarium at the Solid Sound Festival


The Nels Cline Singers with special guest Yuka Honda perform "Thurston County" at the SSF (8/15/10)

First, he will fulfill some sort of music geek’s fantasy by guest playing with Yoko Ono and the Plastic Ono Band along with Iggy Pop and Mike Watt (Oct. 1). Then he’ll mosey over to the 2010 Angel City Jazz Festival (Oct. 2-9) where he will play in no fewer than three different configurations: a trio with old buds Tim Berne and Jim Black (whose insane drumming and giant brandy snifter were highlights of last year); a group improv session with pianist Myra Melford, bassist Mark Dresser and butoh dancer Oguri; and finally, the crowning glory, the premiere of DIRTY BABY, a long-awaited art/music/poetry hybrid project with producer David Breskin and artist Ed Ruscha. The three wize men were interviewed recently about DB by ArtInfo and Flavorpill already posted a thoughtful review. Yesterday, Mr. Cline brought The Singers (joined by Cibo Matto’s Yuka Honda on keyboards) into the NPR studios to perform for the network’s Tiny Desk Concert Series.