By Benedict Sinclair
It’s always nice to get a warm feeling from a show, regardless of the sonic or literal violence you might undergo during it. The bartender at Café Du Nord on Thursday, Oct. 25, was kind enough to hand me my drink with an unusually welcoming smile. Suddenly I overheard a discussion about how beautiful a certain country highway was - the one I’d just happened to grow up on. Ah, home. I’m never sure why, but I get the same feeling from listening to albums that include guitarists Nels Cline (of the Geraldine Fibbers, the Nels Cline Singers, and nowadays Wilco) and Jeff Parker (Tortoise and Isotope 217).
The narrative arc of a Nels Cline solo once seemed to me a bit like a rollercoaster, but considering the sudden, indescribable variations on delay and distortion he tosses around, the amount of 13th chords he employs, and, really, just a plain old spooky control over chaos, I’m more inclined to recall the image of a flickering candle. I’m thinking specifically of the one placed in the center of my table at Café Du Nord, where the Nels Cline Singers played two sets: one as a trio and the other with Parker. I sat, I stared, I heard.
I mean, bassist Devin Hoff and drummer Scott Amendola certainly held their shit down, punctuating Cline’s soaring presence with equal vigor. But I can’t get away from that flame metaphor, the way a practically invisible center produces that glow, refracting in all directions through a bubble glass lamp. It was as if Nels and his sparking fingers lighted the café themselves, that red hue cast over everything perhaps strictly a product of the heat scattering out as this guy poured his soul into unpredictable jazz shredding. Yet the band also fostered many moments where the flickering meant a slight cooling. They’d play pretty, sweet melodies together and still burn it up. The second set was the less out there of the two.
When Parker took the stage, I thought he might upstage Cline in some way. Ha. Things only got hotter, wavering and adjusting to a changing wind, and all Parker had to do was play along, stick to the shooting guard position, stay cool. They even took on a few Ornette Coleman songs, starting with “Peace” from 1959’s The Shape of Jazz to Come. I considered the song Tortoise-y as they began, but then my cloudy memory kicked into gear and I realized what I was witnessing: an extended preview Coleman’s Sunday SF concert (which also kicked multiple tons of ass).
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