When Nels Cline joined Wilco in 2004, a prevailing sense of possibility accompanied him. The band, after all, had unexpectedly just broken through with its most obtuse album yet, bending Jeff Tweedy’s plaintive songs through experiments at once electrifying and accessible. Cline, it seemed, would further catalyze Wilco’s adventurous advance. He had been an emphatic power source to the great Geraldine Fibbers and an essential piece of the ever eccentric Banyannot to mention a diligent improviser with a résumé that crisscrossed Wadada Leo Smith and Thurston Moore, Julius Hemphill and Mike Watt.
But during the last two decades, as Wilco has gradually pulled inward and away from those more esoteric textures, Cline has found other contexts for pushing outward—caterwauling guitar-dude jamsstrutting trio setseven a haunting full-length alongside Pauline Oliveros. What’s more, his 2009 move to New York made a proper downtown improviser out of him in his 50s; his subsequent albums for Blue Note have not only broadcast those relationships but also framed him as something of a classic jazz guitarist. He started with a set of standards, advanced to a thoughtful guitar duoand then, finally, brandished his wonderfully madcap band on 2020’s dazzling Share the Wealth.
Perhaps no Cline project has ever spoken more directly of his range than his latest outfit for Blue Note, the Consentrik Quartet. From the outside, it appears to be an ordinary enough ensemble: a rhythm section countered by guitar and saxophone. All four players, though, arrive at Consentrik with serious bona fides from assorted edges of jazz and new music. Ingrid Laubrock is a daring saxophonist whose works alongside, say, Mary Halvorson and Tyshawn Sorey helped lead to 2020’s brilliant Dreamt Twice, Twice Dreamt. She’s played often with the drummer Tom Rainey, a dynamo who can drive the kit and dance with it. The same holds for bassist Chris Lightcap, whose credits stretch from the very pleasant to the absolutely aggressive. On their self-titled debut, written by Cline over the last six years but recorded in just three days last year, Consentrik explore inside and beyond their collective past, moving from dreamy ballads to scrambled bedlam to boisterous grooves and back in a little more than an hour.
Flexibility unites the members and the material. They are as exquisite on opener “The Returning Angel,” a kind of group deep-breathing exercise, as they are on closer “Time of No Stars,” where they play like longtime friends sharing old stories and finding a sense of calm in the exchange. “Inner Wall,” though, grows into a group growl, the long bass and saxophone tones around Cline’s chiming guitar tightening like a knot just before Rainey arrives; agitation morphs into rebellion, like a great spiritual jazz anthem. What’s most surprising is the audible fun this quartet has digging into or out of a beat, like when they push against a warped clave rhythm during “The 23” or overrun the meter, retreat back toward it, and ultimately let it fall apart in “Question Marks (The Spot).” These are heady players, but they are reveling here in lifetimes of listening, of sharing scattered enthusiasms in real time.
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