Wilco guitarist Nels Cline announced that he will be introducing a new jazz band, the Nels Cline 4. The group’s upcoming debut LP, Currents, Constellations, is out April 13th. The quartet includes guitarist Julian Lage, bassist Scott Colley and drummer Tom Rainey.
The band previewed the album with lead single “Imperfect 10,” a funk strut filled with harmonized electric guitar leads, double-bass thumps and cymbals. Today’s single, “Swing Ghost ’59,” which Cline describes as “a musical conflict between swung and even eighth notes,” arrives with live in-studio performance footage by director Jim Turner. If the vibrant, adventurous quality of the music itself didn’t already make you feel like you were right there in the room with these guys, the video certainly will.
Cline and Lage previously collaborated as a twin-guitar duo on their 2014 LP, Room. But they always imagined what an expanded line-up would sound like. “Even in the earliest days of the duo we used to say, ‘I wonder what we’d do if we ever had a rhythm section,'” Cline, one of Rolling Stone’s 100 Greatest Guitarists, said in a statement.
The guitarists wound up inviting Colley and Rainey to join them for a residency at New York City venue the Stone, setting the stage for the new record. Cline wrote seven out of the LP’s eight tracks; the other is a cover of jazz pianist Carla Bley’s “Temporarily.” Three of the band’s four members will launch a European tour that month, with bassist Jorge Roeder filling in for Colley.
Check out the video for “Swing Ghost ’59” below, as well as further information about Currents, Constellations.
Currents, Constellations Track List
1. Furtive
2. Swing Ghost ’59
3. Imperfect 10
4. As Close As That
5. Amenette
6. Temporarily
7. River Mouth (Parts 1 & 2)
8. For Each, A Flower
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