The Returning Angel: Nels Cline’s 50-Year Journey

Nels Cline widens his eyes, gets an ultra-serious look on his face, brings his hands up.

“Yes,” he says, with an exaggerated theatricality that would impress John Barrymore. “We’re on a—dare I say it—journey.”

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That last word gets extra emphasis, pumping up the over-use and triteness of the expression. The guitarist and composer smirks a little, talking on a Zoom from his home in upstate New York. He just can’t say it with a straight face. But the word aside, it’s a concept he takes very seriously in his music.

“I do want to take you places as the listener,” says the guitarist, 69, who has taken listeners, and himself, a lot of places in a career stretching to 50 years now since he and his twin brother Alex, a gifted drummer and percussionist, emerged as mainstays of the progressive jazz and new music scenes in their native Los Angeles while still teens. 

Nels is best known now as the towering, lanky, blond guitar provocateur of Wilco, a gig he’s had for 21 years now, following stints in bands including Bloc, ex-Minutemen bassist Mike Watt’s ensemble, and the country-punk group Geraldine Fibbers. But he’s had a parallel/concurrent career, with dozens of his own albums as leader or co-leader (a very incomplete Wikipedia discography lists 43).

And he’s made hundreds of other appearances covering a range from rock to way-out experimental music, among them guest spots with avant-garde reeds player and mentor Vinny Golia, MC5 guitarist Wayne Kramer, Yoko Ono, Rickie Lee Jones, both Rufus and Martha Wainwright, and Faye Webster, the latter on her 2024 album Underdressed at the Symphony. 

One thread, in addition to his prodigious talents, runs through it all, though: “I want it to be some kind of, you know, illuminating or intriguing experience. And I want it to be so it’s going to land you somewhere.”

The specific landing in question is the ending of Consentrik Quartet, his new album on which he leads the titular foursome filled out by saxophonist Ingrid Laubrock, bassist Chris Lightcap and drummer Tom Rainey, some of New York’s most accomplished and talented players in the world of avant-garde jazz. More specifically, it’s the closing notes of a piece titled “Time of No Sirens.”

“In the case of this record, it lands you on a complete question mark with ‘Time of No Sirens,’ with that last chord, ” he says.

It is, indeed, a chord that hangs in the air, unresolved—a BMaj7 #5 with a ringing harmonic G, for those of you playing along at home.

“And that’s very intentional. And in a way you could, heaven forbid, start the whole thing over again at that point, and it would make sense.” 

That starting over would bring us back to the album’s opening song, “The Return of the Angel,” which kicks off with a noir-ish arpeggiated guitar figure. But for him it points back to other starting points in his life and to other angels—he has had several songs with angel in the title. 

“There’s a bunch of angels out there,” he says. 

One really comes to mind, though.

“The piece that it reminds me of, almost startlingly, is the opening track for my first record, Angelica, called ‘Angel of Death,’” he says. “It almost follows the same compositional strategy. But I didn’t realize it at the time—and then this one is called ‘The Returning Angel,’ so as the returning angel, the Angel of Death? This I will not answer because I do not know the answer to the question. But I didn’t know that they were so intimately related until I recorded the thing and listened to it back.”

Trying to make sense of various things was very much in the foreground when Cline wrote “Time of No Sirens,” originally for solo guitar, to capture the experience of a very unexpected landing for him and his wife, musician Yuka Honda (co-founder of the band Cibo Matto), as well as for the world at large. 

“The title reflects the sudden transition from our apartment in Brooklyn, on the same block as a fire station and around the corner from a police station, particularly noisy as the pandemic was ramping up, to living in the woods in this house somewhere between Maryland, New York, and Davenport, New York,” he says. 

“It was quite a sudden transition, but it was also something that Yuka and I adjusted to really quickly. And I wasn’t really aware of how much Yuka wanted to leave the city before I ever even met her. So in spite of the trauma that it was all imbued with, it was also kind of a time that was illuminating. It was a time of illumination of a certain sort. And it became evident to me, after a while, that we weren’t going back to the city to live. But the quiet, the contrast was so high. It was really a different scene.”

He laughs. “So that piece was about that, and that’s how this record ends.”

On its way to that landing, Consentrik Quartet takes quite the flight, moving smoothly from that dark-hued intro of “The Returning Angel” to the post-pop puzzle “Surplus” to the mutedly somber elegy “Allende” to the rippling four-part flow of “House of Steam”  to the lets-go-nuts frenzy of “The Bag” to the jagged, unsettled “Question Marks (The Spot) — the latter setting up the closing question of “Sirens.” Not that any one piece is any one thing, as shifts of mood, tempo and intensity abound. 

Perhaps key among the pieces is “Satomi,” inspired by and dedicated to Satomi Matsuzaki of the ever-inventive San Francisco band Deerhoof, another kind of angel for Honda and him. The first part is built on a joyous theme—a little wacky surf-jazz—with boisterous improvisation between the four musicians, before slipping to a more inward-reflective mood with a fully composed chamber-ish segment.

Cline says the piece was sparked by a tough time for Matsuzaki, a long-time friend and sometimes collaborator of his and Honda’s. During the pandemic she had to fly back and forth between New York and Japan numerous times, with two-week mandatory quarantines in Japan on each trip, to take care of her ailing parents, her father ultimately passing away.

“I was very worried,” Cline says. “But through all of that she was still the most solid friend, just so in our corner, so concerned about us. It was kind of mind-blowing. So I wanted to write a piece in tribute to her, to our friendship and her strength.” 

About half the album was written during the pandemic, he says. It was, needless to say, a challenging time. Cline had built considerable momentum in the several years before with a spectacular run of albums and performances, including, of course, steady road-work with Wilco. 

In 2016, having been signed to Blue Note by label president Don Was, he released Lovers, a surprising turn in which he showcased a highly personalized take on “romantic” music with a large ensemble and a mix of original material and interpretations of material from sources as diverse as Rodgers & Hart and Henry Mancini on one end of the scale and Sonic Youth and Annette Peacock on the other. That was followed the next year by Currents, Constellations billed to the Nels Cline 4 with bracing rocked-up jazz with him and Julian Lage as a powerhouse guitar duo frontline—a complement to the dazzling acoustic duo album, Room, they had made a few years earlier.

Next came Share the Wealth from the latest iteration of the long-running Nels Cline Singers—Cline, sax-attacker Skerik, drummer Scott Amendola, and John Zorn alums keyboardist Brian Marsella, bassist Trevor Dunn, and percussionist Cyro Baptista—with its anything-goes mix of shredding antics and space-age effects. Yes, as with most of his own projects, there are no singers in the Nels Cline Singers. 

This, Cline notes, came out at “very opportune time of November 2020 during the lockdown and right after the election,” the band never even getting a chance to perform live. (This Singers lineup, though, will get to play together March 28 at the Big Ears Festival in Knoxville, Tennessee. It’s one of four sets he’s doing there, finishing with one featuring the Consentrik Quartet.)

“If people were just sitting around at home looking for something to do, they could listen to Share the Wealth. But it wasn’t really so noticed at the time. That’s okay. It’s still out there. You can listen to it. But it was a weird time, you know. No work.”

Yes, but right before that he had gotten a grant from the Ars Nova Workshop in Philadelphia. Initially it was intended to go toward new works from the Nels Cline 4, but Julian Lage was not going to be available.

“So I said I’ve got this other quartet idea I’m working on, which was the Consentrik Quartet,” he says. 

Rainey was a natural, having also been the drummer in the Nels Cline 4. Laubrock was also a natural, being married to Rainey. And Lightcap has worked with the two of them regularly. 

“So I got the grant to write that music in 2019, and then boom, uh, pandemic time.”

Once the lockdown lifted, it was right to work. The band’s first gig was a doozy, opening for the Tedeschi Trucks Band at the Beacon Theatre in New York (Susan Tedeschi and Derek Trucks are long-time friends of Cline’s). And in early 2024 there was a small East Coast tour supported by the grant, including three shows in two days at Solar Myth in Philly, the home club of the Ars Nova organization (you can find recordings of those three sets at archive.org). The album was recorded in a crisp two-day studio run, bursting with the energy of the live shows as it flows across its many moods and styles.

The music, like everything Cline does, covers a lot of ground and is hard to pin down. Cline casually refers to it as “fake jazz” and “folk jazz.”

Isn’t it, well, jazz jazz?

“No, I’m not really a jazz dude,” he says. “I don’t know the American songbook backwards and forwards in every key and whatnot. But the folk-jazz thing is what I was doing with the trio. I’d write these songs and I remember asking at one point, I don’t remember which song it related to, but I said, ‘Do you guys mind playing my sort of weird fusion folk-jazz?’ And everybody was like, ‘What are you talking about?’ But that’s just my insecurity.”

He admits that he’s “self-conscious and neurotic” given musicians who are deep into jazz tradition.

“I’m, you know, a mutt,” he says. “I’m a complete mutt. I’m playing in a prominent rock band. I had a moment where I thought I was going to stop playing rock, but it didn’t last for more than three or four years. And then I ended up jumping back into it with Mike Watt. Or with Bloc even before that.”

Through all that, through his time with Geraldine Fibbers and then Scarnella with Fibbers singer Carla Bozulich, through his ongoing tenure with Wilco, with whom he has helped leader Jeff Tweedy realize ambitions to stretch the music way beyond its Americana foundations, he never paused his own pursuit of explorations outside, sometimes far outside rock. 

“I was just really having it kind of always both ways, all the time,” he says. With a sly smile, he adds, “Which was viewed with great suspicion.”   

It’s a nice spring day in May, 1975—50 full years ago now. A few dozen people, including this writer, a freshman at the school, are gathered in a multi-purpose room beneath Herrick Chapel at Occidental College in Los Angeles’ Eagle Rock neighborhood to see a performance by a trio called Ring: Nels Cline (also a freshman there) on guitar, twin Alex on drums and percussion and their friend Steve Conley on bass. The music is astonishing, clearly drawing on such heady influences as Mahavishnu Orchestra with guitarist John McLaughlin and chamber-world-jazz quartet Oregon and its guitarist Ralph Towner, but with its own distinct character and explorations manifesting the impressive skills and imaginations of these three talented musicians. Looking back, it stands as a seed that contained everything Cline would go on to do in his vast music career.

“I have been very lucky in life and I’ve never tried to be this kind of polymath dude that’s done tons of stuff. It was not my objective. I think that my brother Alex and I, from a young age, really just wanted to play our own music, even back in those early days. And some of the aesthetic concerns that you hear on Share the Wealth with the Singers and on Consentrik Quartet, it’s really not that far afield from what we were doing back at Occidental.”

Which isn’t to say he hasn’t changed much since then.

“You can say it,” he insists. “It’s true!”

Not that he hasn’t grown as an artist.

“Definitely progressed, at least theoretically” he says. “And I don’t mean theoretically in terms of progression, but in terms of music theory. My brain has advanced somewhat, but at the same time possibly has ossified because of all the rock ’n’ roll I keep playing.”

He laughs again. “So I’m not sitting there trying to push a compositional envelope, like somebody like Ingrid does. You’ve heard Ingrid’s music. It can be super-challenging. And I couldn’t play her music, I mean unless she designed it for me. But whoa, the rigors of John Zorn or Ingrid Laubrock. Too much for the old man.”

Old, of course, is a matter of perspective.

“Well, 69 was the year that my father passed away in 1985, so it has a sort of chilling resonance,” he says, noting that he and Alex are talking about doing some special performances when they turn 70 next January. “But at the same time, I feel pretty good. Still out there rocking out and trying to play some music that isn’t crap. And that means something to me. In spite of everything. It’s obviously not the most important thing going on, but at least maybe it’s nourishment for people like me when I was young, looking to music and art not just for escape, but for inspiration and meaning.”

To see our running list of the top 100 greatest rock stars of all time, click here.