Nels Cline 4 at Freight & Salvage Coffeehouse, February 17, 2019

Freight & Salvage Coffeehouse presents Nels Cline 4 featuring Nels Cline, Scott Colley, Julian Lage, Tom Rainey, and Jorge Roeder
2020 Addison Street, Berkeley, CA 94704-1104 USA
7:00 PM, Sunday, February 17, 2019

Back to the previous event! ☸ Up to the 2019 yearbox! ☸ Up to the 2019 event list! ☸ On to the next event!

[7:05 PM; lights down, greetings and announcements from Andrea Hirsig, band out]

1. [7:09 PM] Furtive
2. [7:22 PM] Temporarily
3. [7:33 PM] Memoir »
4. [7:36 PM] Pacific Pine Song
5. [7:46 PM] Swing Ghost ‘59
   [7:56 PM; Greetings, banter and back-announce from Nels]
6. [7:58 PM] As Close As That
7. [8:05 PM] Amenette
   [8:16 PM; banter and back-announce]
8. [8:17 PM] (Nels-Jorge duet on an unidentified Paul Motian tune) »
9. [8:22 PM] The Owl of Cranston
10. [8:27 PM] Imperfect 10
    [8:34 PM; final words from Nels]
11. [8:36 PM] River Mouth, part 1 »
12. [8:41 PM] River Mouth, part 2
    [8:47 PM; all done! bows, then off]

• Nels Cline: guitar;
• Julian Lage: guitar;
• Tom Rainey: drums;
• Jorge Roeder: contrabass.

I was slightly miffed when the band came out at the start of the show to note that Scott Colley was absent, but Jorge Roeder is a great bass player too, and I'm guessing that his years playing with Julian helped keep things tight tonight. I noticed just now that the Freight event page doesn't list Scott anymore, so I suppose they might have announced the change in advance … ah well, guess I should have been paying better attention!

Seems like they played most of the tracks on the new album. And wrung the heck out of them, they did! Nels introduced Memoir as a tune by the late great John Abercrombie; if I didn't know better, I'd have named it as a permutation of Nature Boy instead. Good to have those pauses to share proper titles!

Nels looks darn good for 63 … he made a teasing comment about Scott being 'just a sprout' or something like that in his back announce for Amenette, which Nels described as a remix of Scott's tune Street Beat through Ornette Coleman's harmolodic sensibility, hence Amen > ette.

Nels may have introduced the titles of the Paul Motian tunes, but if so, I didn't catch them. Hopefully someone else with big ears will know what he said (or what was played!). Mark pointed out that last summer, Nels played a similar set with The Owl of Cranston identified as a single Motion tune. Might be one of tonight's unidentified songs. (That title was confirmed by another freakazoid, yay!) Heck… maybe one of the folks in the front row has a setlist picture to share…

After the heavy duty guitar skronk of Imperfect 10, River Mouth was a gentle transition to wind things down. Seemed to me like they could have spun out a few more variations, but hey, all good things must come to an end.

Thanks guys! It was fun listening to you tonight!!

Big thanks to Ting for the photo gallery!

Whoa! This section is incomplete for now, sorry!

Back to the previous event! ☸ Up to the 2019 yearbox! ☸ Up to the 2019 event list! ☸ On to the next event!