Slipping into Something: A Conversation with Nels Cline on the Consentrik Quartet

Wheels. Compact discs and vinyl records. Rings. A full moon. A plate. A Pizza. In our daily life, we are surrounded by circles. Even prehistoric generations saw the importance of the circle, carving them out of stone and timber and featuring the shape in petroglyphs and cave paintings. However, despite its constant presence, the circle remains a somewhat mysterious form. Instead of the points and edges of every other shape, a circle forecasts a continuous curving flow. Where any other shape can be measured by the length or width of its sides, the circle’s never failingly equidistant space from its center to any spot along its side requires the use of a seemingly unusual number – π, which we have to round to make even somewhat useable – for any relevant calculations. When viewing a circle in a more theoretical light, the seemingly routine becomes truly fascinating. In this sense, the shape is an excellent reference for Nels Cline’s new Consentrik Quartet and their eponymous debut album (Blue Note, 2025).

Over the last half-century, Cline has built a career in which he has pushed the improvisational capacity of the guitar outward. His affinity for jazz, experimental music, rock, punk, and more has led him to spaces where he’s done everything from exploring John Coltrane’s final thoughts (Interstellar Space Revisited (The Music of John Coltrane) (Atavistic, 1999) to expanding upon love themes from 1930s horror films (“Beautiful Love” off of Lovers (Blue Note, 2016)). He’s circumnavigated a wide sonic gamut across his thirty albums as a leader and hundreds more as a sideman, with the latter even including a two-decade stint with indie heavyweight Wilco. In the process, Cline has cemented himself as -in the judgment of Rolling Stone – one of 20 New Guitar Gods and one of the top 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time.

Given these bona fides, it would be incredibly easy for Cline to push himself into the spotlight with his own group. One could envision a quartet under his name as taking the shape of a triangle; the guitarist standing up front with a line of straight-line of the other three artists backing with support. But the Consentrik Quartet does the exact opposite. In surrounding himself with other masters of the craft – saxophonist Ingrid Laubrock, bassist Chris Lightcap, and drummer Tom Rainey – Cline ensures no one stands behind. Instead, ideas of one member curve into those of another, forming a singular whole. It’s often difficult to tell who is the lead, with no edge or corner standing out. There is no singular predominant figure but rather a collective whole. Taking the group’s name from the old Middle English spelling of concentric, the group underscores the importance of consensual conversation in musical creation while emphasizing that these thoughts of co-equal creation are perhaps as old as the circle itself.

The result is a record where the four artist’s musical lines spiral and wind their way around not only each other but also silence. The album does not shy away from silence and space, as the quartet ingeniously ripples around it. That’s not to say there are not moments of aggression or fervor; the punkish post-rock anthem of “Satomi” and the tumultuous disorientation of “Question Marks” particularly stand out in that regard. And even in its quieter moments, there is usually something lurking beneath the surface. In “The 23,” for instance, one finds breathing room between the treble instruments while atop Lightcap’s propulsive groove. But on pieces like “The Returning Angel” and “Allende,” the hushed tones, serious conversations, and quiet blues ripple even further outward when they find themselves over fairly desolate backdrops. Ultimately, Consentrik Quartet loops around a wide terrain – tranquility, aggression, individualism, collectiveness, to name a few – and showcases how these are not separate points that stand alone but rather just different stops along an arced curve.

PostGenre: The definition of “concentric” is “having a common center.” What do you feel is the common center of this quartet?

Nels Cline: Well, the common center, I guess, would have to be improvisation and mutual respect. 

PG: The press materials for the record reference – and you can hear these points on the album, too – Jimmy Giuffre 3 and John Scofield with Joe Lovano. While there are more aggressive moments, much of Consentrik Quartet is fairly laid back but still free. 

NC: I mean, to put my work into a perspective I don’t often think about so much, there’s always gonna be a quieter free piece on all of my records. I usually think of these pieces as the ones most people skip over when they’re going through the album if they passively listening to it. It’s the song that doesn’t seem to go anywhere. Those are the pieces that I cherish the most, not just in my music but in music in general.

PG: Do you feel your love of these slower-moving pieces has developed over time?

NC: No, this isn’t something that has come with my advanced age. It’s kind of always been there. And it comes out of my love of Jimmy Giuffre’s music, particularly from the late ‘50s and early to mid ‘60s. A lot of activity in the cool school of music – and not just on the West Coast, where it kind of became a cliché- has influenced me. Jimmy Giuffre, when he went and formed his trio in New York with Paul Bley and Steve Swallow, explored a different instrumental combination, and I think the music was still incredibly open in terms of improvisation. Everybody’s using their ears and leaving a lot of space. That’s what we try to do with the Consentrik Quartet on some of these more laid-back things. 

Conversely, if that’s the right word, pieces like “The Returning Angel,” ”Inner Wall,” and “Time of No Sirens,” probably have the most space, but have no improvisation on the guitar. The guitar part is completely composed on each of those songs. On “The Returning Angel,” the only thing I improvised is how many times I play two chords behind Ingrid’s introductory improvisation moment.

PG: Did you always intend to have pieces where you are not improvising?

NC: No, that’s just the way those pieces ended up. I came up with a guitar part, then folded the head in around that. That approach makes sure that the group goes into certain more spacious areas. I like to try to do that with improvisation as well, but it just isn’t on those pieces. This group can play pieces like that without getting antsy, and then we can rock out. 

PG: Do you feel the group plays the same live as on the album? The video released for “The 23,” for instance, starts with a much more aggressive sound than is on the record. 

NC: Oh yeah. We started screeching on that because the record starts with “The Returning Angel” then flow into “The 23” on the record. But for the video, we could not show that without playing both pieces. So, I wanted to start with an exclamation point, just to wake people up, I guess. I also think it’s a slightly humorous way to start the piece. And Ingrid just kept going with it. The result was a more aggressive intro. But I think, once you get past the aggressive beginning, the song on the video is essentially the same as on the recording. 

We haven’t been able to play an actual tour yet, and some of these pieces were pretty old. “The 23,” for one, was written during the [Coronavirus pandemic] lockdown. And some of them are newer. “Inner Wall” is brand new, and we had never played it live before recording it. Same with “Down Close.” 

But as far as playing these pieces live, I think the only thing that’s gonna sound very different live is “House of Steam” because, for the record, I layered some guitars on it to get extra resonance on the opening theme. 

PG: You mentioned how some of the older songs were written during the pandemic, a time when you would have been shut off from the world to a large degree. During that period, you also moved to upstate rural New York, away from the city. Do you feel moving to a less hectic place changed how you approach space and silence? 

NC: Wow, that’s an excellent question. I don’t know if the experience changed the result, but moving definitely affected how I was thinking about silence. Actually, the piece ”Time of No Sirens” is specifically about the amount of space where I am now. I wrote it in a very quiet place, and the title reflects that sudden change from the noise of the city.

But I think I was already wanting to go into these areas with silence well before any actual experience with the sudden silence experienced by moving. I certainly didn’t see living in a rural area in my future, at that time. [My wife] Yuka [Honda] and I were living in a building in Brooklyn, and I realized that she had been wanting to leave the city since before I met her. And a good friend of ours found us a place upstate.

The funny part, however, is that we are still in the city all of the time. Yuka has had a bunch of work in the city the last few weeks. I just played with Jorge Roeder the other night, and I’m playing with Larry Ochs for two nights at the Stone later this week. I’ll be back to play with Tim Berne, and Yuka’s got other work here too. So, the city is still pulling at us. We are very lucky to have a place we can usually stay when we are here. 

But the quiet when we get upstate is always something special. As soon as we arrive, there’s an incredible sigh of relief. Even though we’re not irritated or bugged by being in the city, once we get up to where we live, we both always sit and look at each other and feel relaxed. Moving upstate was not what I had planned for my later life, but here it is. And we get to live in a very healthy environment. The air is incredible. We don’t even have light pollution. It’s very different from the city and truly magical in its own way, just far away from the city. 

PG: Were you at all hesitant to move upstate? In other interviews, you noted how, after growing up in Los Angeles, you spent decades trying to move to New York City. Now you moved away from the city. 

NC: Yeah, I didn’t want to leave New York City. I love the city. But we adjusted to living upstate very easily. We’ve had three places upstate since 2020. We’re still looking to land somewhere permanent up there, which is a whole other story, but once we were there, we got locked into it. 

PG: You mentioned earlier how the band has not toured yet. Part of that may come from how infrequently, for a while, you performed together as a quartet. Starting in 2018, you were performing together only once a year for a few years.

NC:  There are so many problems with trying to get a band together. Everybody’s busy. And not just me. Ingrid’s probably the busiest out of everyone in the band. She has so much going on. 

PG: How did you come up with the membership of the quartet? You started as a trio with Tom and Chris, right?

NC:  Yeah, I was messing around very informally with a trio with Tom and Chris where I played a very Gabor Szabo-inspired part as well as a lot of really droney modal pieces. We mostly covered other people’s songs but also played one or two of my pieces. But for both my band- the Singers – and the nascent version of the Consentrik Quartet, I found I wanted another instrument in the treble clef that I could play off. I had gotten incredibly burned out on being the main voice with a rhythm section. So, for the Singers, I added Skerik to the band and for the Consentrik Quartet, Ingrid. 

PG: However, before both, you generally avoided the saxophone in your small groups.

BC: In the woodwind department, I always favored the clarinet and avoided the saxophone. I was, I guess, kind of burnt on the saxophone. But suddenly – and I don’t have an explanation for it, frankly – I just wanted to hear the saxophone. After listening to Tom and Ingrid’s duo work on a livestream from their apartment during the lockdown, I  checked out a bunch of YouTube clips of them live and loved how they sounded together. 

PG: Of course, you and Tom have worked together for many years.

NC: Tom and I go way back to the trio that I formed with him and Andrea Parkins about twenty years ago. I must have met Tom when he was playing in an improvising trio with Drew Gress and Tim [Berne]. Fantastic.

PG: Tom’s also in your other quartet, the Nels Cline 4. Do you feel he plays a similar role in both groups? 

NC: Oh yeah, it’s very similar. It was a long time ago, but I remember later setting up to play with Andrea and Tom at Tonic the first time we were playing together. At the sound check, Tom and I had a strong and immediate level of communication from the beginning. When I play with him, I greatly want to feature him in the music prominently since he’s a master. I also love listening to him, not just playing with him. 

I think he plays a very similar role in both the NC4, as I call it, and the Consentrik Quartet. Musically, stylistically, and communication-wise, I don’t think there’s a whole lot of difference. I also didn’t give him a lot of guidance on what to play. I just play the piece and let him do whatever Tom wants. 

PG: Anyway, so you were initially watching a livestream of Tom with Ingrid? 

NC: Listening to him with Ingrid, I thought they sounded incredible together. Since Ingrid is married to Tom, I figured she probably also knew what we were working on together and might be interested in joining us. And she was interested, and it worked out. 

PG: So, was the core concept of this quartet figured out upon adding Ingrid?

NC: I know I was a little sheepish at first. As a team, we slipped conceptually into a space that I was not at all planning on playing in with this band. I was initially trying to keep things more funky,  rocky, and abstract. But as I wrote the tunes, we started finding things we had fun playing together, and it turned out we sounded different than I initially conceived. I was asking everyone if they minded playing a piece like “The 23,” which I never thought was particularly fabulous. I just thought it was maybe almost trite or something silly. But they vehemently disagreed with me on that, which made me feel a little more relaxed about bringing in a piece like “Slipping into Something.”

PG: Why did you initially think the rest of the group would be uninterested in the music you had written?

NC: Well, I know you know Ingrid’s music. Her own music is extremely demanding. I couldn’t play it in a million years. I just thought that maybe my stuff was a little more simplistic by comparison, though I’m not sure that is the right word to use. But we get to rock out on it in terms of improvising too, which is fun. And Ingrid is so great. In the press release for the album, I said that she sounds so essential to this album that it almost sounds more like her record when I listen to it. 

PG: Does it bother you at all that someone else’s instrument is so prominent on a record under your own name?

NC: No. In my case, it’s a combination of two things. First, is how beautifully she plays the material. She sounds so great on it. Second, I’m also becoming more and more of a reluctant soloist as I’m getting older. However, I do think I need to try to shed that reluctance and inhibition that’s been building for years. 

PG: Why you have been reluctant to solo? 

NC: I don’t know if it’s a kind of uptightness or an out-and-out fear, but I just don’t know if I have the same head of steam that I had forty years ago. Or even twenty years ago. I don’t know. Maybe it’s because after fifty years of making music, more people are paying attention to me, and that attention weirds me out or something. I have no idea. I don’t look at social media, which is helpful. I wouldn’t want to think about what other people are thinking about what I’m doing today. But like I said, I think I just need to shake it off, get out there, and just play.

PG: Going back to your compositions, how do you typically write? Are you sitting down with the guitar and coming up with parts? 

NC: Yeah, I’m playing guitar. My pieces are almost always an outgrowth of my sitting around goofing with an idea. For pieces like “Down Close,” “Surplus,” and “The Bag,” I had an idea of the chords and a certain tempo. But I write out all of the melodies after singing them and then finding them on the guitar. It’s all done by ear. It’s not theoretical.

In the case of something like ”The 23,” I had the chord progression first and then wrote those specific chord voicings and came up with melodic content later. But these more swing-based tunes are completely done by ear. I could do them without a guitar, just singing into a tape recorder. But since I know I’m going to play it on guitar, inevitably, I figure it out on guitar while I’m singing the melodies. 

“Inner Wall” is strangely related to “Down Close” because they both explore a four-note thing in Ab minor. But they are completely different pieces. I don’t know if anybody would ever notice the connection between the two, but they were written at the same time and are explorations of the same kind of four-note idea, weirdly. 

PG: Did you take the same approach to composition for your original pieces on Lovers (Blue Note, 2016)? It seems working with a larger ensemble might require a much more formal approach to composition.

NC: Well, Lovers is a whole other kettle of fish. It had such a long gestational period where we worked on the pieces. I don’t even know if you could call the gestational period ’cause it was so long. It was also a different process because the arrangements were mostly the work of Michael Leonhart. There are certain arrangements that I was very specific about. For example, for the Jimmy Giuffre piece, “Cry, Want,” I had the idea of the marimba and some other parts of our version’s sound. 

But on my own pieces, I didn’t have any orchestration ideas. I wanted Michael to just do whatever he thought was best. I didn’t hear those arrangements until we were recording the record. There was no way to get everybody in the thirteen to seventeen-piece group together to see how it sounded. There’s obviously a lot of trust there. 

Certainly, Michael and I got together, the two of us, at his apartment when he was living right around the corner from Yuka and me in the West Village. Michael played stuff on a Fender Rhodes that he had in his apartment, and we discussed things about the specifics of the music. For example, on “Secret Love,” I wanted that heartbeat cluster in five that goes over the bar when it gets to the bridge. Michael said, “How about reharmonizing the bridge with an all-new chorus?” I thought that sounded good. So, I went home and did that, and then he arranged it. 

Every song has had a different trajectory or different formula. The beginning of “Beautiful Love” is a direct reference to the original version that appears in the Boris Karloff movie, The Mummy. It’s in 3/4, and we went for this old-timey vibe at the beginning. That was my idea, but Michael executed it. He did it perfectly because that’s who he is. 

Even then, there was not all that much heavy saxophone on the album. Charles Pillow takes his Johnny Hodges-like alto melody at the end of my piece, “You Noticed,” but there are a lot of clarinets, muted brass, and flutes. But things were completely different on tour. We did a brief tour of Europe and Michael had used student orchestras for it. We had a different orchestra every day, and there wasn’t a single flute that entire run. The colleges and high schools playing with us never gave us a flutist. And that absence of a flute made the project sound very different. I find the presence of the flute very crucial to some of those pieces. Michael would adjust the arrangements for every gig. He would tweak it and change it. And it was amazing. 

PG: It sounds like your approach to composing is fairly relaxed. You have worked a lot with Vinnie Golia, who has written so many incredibly long and intricate pieces. Do you feel like you picked up anything from him on composition, even though his approach is very different?

NC: Oh my. I was just in Los Angeles playing some duo improvisations with Vinnie for a documentary, so I have been thinking about him a lot lately. It’s interesting that would ask me about this, but his way of writing is nothing like how I think or write. He has so many simultaneous events happening at once. And as he’s gotten older, everything just keeps getting bigger and bigger. I think he approaches music in such heroic musical terms.

When I started thinking about the Consentrik Quartet, I planned for it to be a far more modest affair. Not a whole lot of arm waving or drama, which I am drawn to almost irrevocably in music. We still ended up with some drama and arm-waving because it’s natural. But I have been striving for years – and I think, in a way, I achieved in the duo with Julian [Lage] –  something far more modest and intimate. I think the Consentrik Quartet is aiming for that as well.

‘Consentrik Quartet’ will be released on Blue Note Records on March 15, 2025. More information about Nels Cline is available on his website. The Consentrik Quartet will be celebrating with an album release performance at Big Ears on March 30th. At Big Ears, Cline will also perform with his group, the Nels Cline Singers on March 28th as well as performing with eucademix [Yuka Honda’s solo electronics project] on that same date and Jenny Scheinman on March 29th.