New Monastery  Nels Cline

NELS CLINE Probably best known now as the lead guitarist of Wilco, Nels Cline has been active in the West Coast jazz and improvised music scene for 25 years; New Monastery is an overview of the knotty and beautiful music of one of his heroes, the jazz com

Ben Ratliff, New York Times, September 10, 2006

#7 Top AltJazz CDs for 2006Nels Cline, perhaps better known as guitarist for the band Wilco, explores the compositions of jazz legend Andrew Hill and the results are stunning. Cline is joined by talented musicians like Ben Goldberg on clarinets, Andrea Pa

John Matouk, www.About.com, Sept 12, 2006

The problem with tribute records is that they are often too literal, and artists mistake reverence for true appreciation. Not so with Nels Cline's New Monastery: A View into the Music of Andrew Hill. If the best way to honor a source is to demonstrate how

John Kelman, All About Jazz, 9/22/06

The compositions of Andrew Hill, one of the best composers in the last 50 years of jazz, don't glow with the recognizable style of a certain time. They use unusual harmonies and can sometimes seem to be missing the proper signposts. Nobody performs th

Ben Ratcliff, The New York Times, 9/12/06

The eight-word subtitle just about sums it up. Cline and his fellows don't take the often too reverential repertory approach with Hill's music, and instead offer up a programme that's as stimulating for its approach as it is for the ground it covers, and

Nic Jones, All About Jazz, 9/29/06

On "New Monastery" guitarist Nels Cline not only reaffirms his jazz roots, which have added such depth to his work with Wilco, he enriches the jazz idiom with some unusual instrumental and sonic choices. The album pays tribute to Andrew Hill, th

William Meyer, Chicago Tribune, 9/29/06

With his inventive approach to composition for jazz ensemble, Andrew Hill has created a compact body of work that bridges the worlds of bebop, modal, "new thing," and third stream styles while sounding like nothing else on the planet. In the

Kevin Macneil Brown, Dusted, 9/24/06

Younger jazz luminaries such as Vijay Iyer and Jason Moran regularly praise Andrew Hill's compositions, but none have been brave enough to fill an album with the pianist's dense, haunting tunes. Wilco fans unaware of Nels Cline's extensive improv résumé m

Hank Shteamer, Time Out-New York, 9/28/06

Pianist-composer Andrew Hill has been actively extending the jazz tradition on nearly three dozen recordings since 1960. It may be Wilco guitarist Nels Cline's latest disc that invigorates Hill's cachet among younger-generation fans of adventurous mus

Sam Prestianni, San Francisco Weekly, 10/25/06

Heavy metal is not the kind of music I get into that much, but combine it with avant garde jazz and it's often a whole 'nother story. Caspar Brotzmann, The Scorch Trio, parts of The Vandermark 5; these guys have a way of making two seemingly incompati

Pico, Blog Critics, 10/13/2006

On New Monastery, guitarist Nels Cline adds Bobby Bradford on cornet, Ben Goldberg on clarinet and Andrea Parkins on accordion to his usual trio in an exploration of the music of Andrew Hill. A wide variety of moods are explored, from the dirge "

Ian Douglas Moore, UCD Advocate, 10/11/06

Marked by beautiful melodies and countermelodies, angular phrases, odd bar structures, ambiguous harmonies, complex intervals, intense vamps and ostinatos, churning beats and elastic tempos, and a malleable emotional template, the compositions of Andr

Ted Pankin, Downbeat, December 2006