Guitarist Nels Cline and his band, The Nels Cline Singers....

Guitarist Nels Cline and his band, The Nels Cline Singers (which includes no singers), complete their Tour de NPR (see the band's Tiny Desk Concert earlier this month) with a Piano Jazz session. Cline is most widely known for his mind-bending guitar solos and lap steel guitar textures with Wilco, but he's been making improvisational music and jazz of a free, celestial nature since the late 1970s.

Los Angeles-born, Cline began playing guitar at age 12, when twin brother Alex Cline took up drums. Nels has been playing in a variety of settings with other high-caliber musicians ever since. In addition to the aforementioned Wilco, his sterling indie-rock resume includes work with Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo of Sonic Youth, legendary Minutemen/Firehose bassist Mike Watt, and ex-Jane's Addiction drummer Stephen Perkins, to name a few.

On the jazz side, credits include work with Charlie Haden, Wadada Leo Smith and the late bassist Eric Von Essen. He also teamed up with drummer Greg Bandian to record a modern rendition of John Coltrane's 1967 album Interstellar Space, titled Interstellar Space Revisited: The Music of John Coltrane. The Nels Cline Singers, which also includes drummer Scott Amendola, bassist Devin Hoff and keyboardist Yuka Honda, met up with guest host Jon Weber for a set of Nels Cline's originals and a few tunes by Ornette Coleman and Thelonious Monk.

Cline kicks off the session in trio form, with drummer Amendola and bassist Hoff on an original tune dedicated to jazz guitarist Jim Hall. "[Jim Hall's] playing is really pretty free," Cline says. "He's always forward-looking, never boring and absolutely inspiring. Actually, many years ago, I wrote this little ditty for him." "Blues, Too" opens on a noirish and gritty line, shifts tempo and heads briefly into a heady, atmospheric trip before resolving around the opening theme.

"That piece is one of the few I've written that could kind of be called a jazz piece, in that I wanted to reference the Cool School of the '50s at its most avant-garde," Cline says.
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