I was in Chicago for a long weekend in 2006, and I remember picking up one of their free weekly papers on the street corner and flipping through the music section. I was astounded by the descriptions and analysis of music, it seemed like a sign of a really strong and knowledgeable music community. Maybe Chicago is more intensely focused on their music scene than San Francisco, but occasionally I get the feeling that local audiences come across as daft or slow or maybe just too stoned to some touring groups. There was some of that feeling in the air at Café Du Nord when the Nels Cline Singers were playing.
Their set was a traditional jazz "program," with Nels Cline leading the band, introducing songs and players, and madly waving his hands and guitar to indicate the changes and endings of songs to the others. The crowd at Du Nord, while loving the many tasty solos, seemed mildly befuddled by the Singers' use of noise and the lack of congealed song forms. For example, there were several "Are we supposed to clap now?" moments of awkward applause, several clusters of people who left early, and even one fan covering her ears.
Maybe people were hoping for something closer to Wilco. The jazz covers they played (including 3 Ornette Coleman tunes in a row) were far from the comparatively ordinary rock music Nels Cline is known for making with Jeff Tweedy. Several of the songs they played were written by various legends of the Bay Area's avant-jazz scene, but none of the names Nels Cline mentioned seemed to ring a bell for more than a handful of audience members (I was not among those whose bells were rung). At the end of the second set, Nels Cline emphatically reminded the audience that bassist Devon Hoff and drummer Scott Amendola are Bay Area residents, as if chastising us for not showing greater appreciation for our neighborly musical titans.
As for the music, Nels Cline gets some seriously blistering sounds from his guitar. I mentioned in a previous blog how Ira Kaplan of Yo La Tengo is one of the best indie rock guitar players around, partly because he's not afraid to let his solos collapse and make a mess. Nels Cline plays with a similar sense of abandon, but his playing is like a gymnast being tumbled around a gigantic clothes dryer and never losing balance. He piled one wild riff on top of another for minutes on end. Jeff Parker, the special guest of the evening who is also the guitarist in Chicago's Tortoise, played more traditional sounding jazz guitar but added some noisy touches with his pedals and violent anti-technique on the strings.
For all the noise and sound effects and discordant atonal fuck-the-melody rocking, the Singers kept a solid groove going, and when they all tuned into the refrain of the song the room was moving. I'm sure there were several musicians in the audience who went straight home to practice after getting leveled by the Nels Cline Singers.
Their set was a traditional jazz "program," with Nels Cline leading the band, introducing songs and players, and madly waving his hands and guitar to indicate the changes and endings of songs to the others. The crowd at Du Nord, while loving the many tasty solos, seemed mildly befuddled by the Singers' use of noise and the lack of congealed song forms. For example, there were several "Are we supposed to clap now?" moments of awkward applause, several clusters of people who left early, and even one fan covering her ears.
As for the music, Nels Cline gets some seriously blistering sounds from his guitar. I mentioned 