• McNeil Island / Pumpkin (6:20)
• Not Sa No Sa (8:55)
• No Doubt / 11/8 / Dance with Death (23:32)
• Yokada Yokada / The Rumproller (4:48)
• Dedication (8:03)
• Reconciliation / New Monastery (10:30)
• Compulsion (11:09)

Artists

• Scott Amendola
  Drums
• Bobby Bradford
  cornet
• Nels Cline
  Guitar
• Ben Goldberg
  Clarinet
• Devin Hoff
  Bass
• Andrea Parkins
  electric accordian, electronics

Reviews

• 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 composer Andrew Hill.
  Ben Ratliff
  New York Times [September 10, 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 "Dance With Death" to the tongue-in-cheek blues of "Yokada Yokada/The Rumproller," where Cline's solo puts a new twist on cliché licks before the song falls apart into an electronic drone.
  
  There is a looseness to the arrangements that at times borders on the chaotic, as on the group soloing in "Not Sa No Sa," but Cline always reigns things in just in time by introducing the melody of the next tune in a medley or signaling the end of the piece. Most of the songs have a very collective feeling - while everyone gets plenty of room to solo, they are often accompanied by the rest of the band playing background figures. This is a real strength of New Monastery. The musicians aren't simply using Hill's music as a springboard to their individual ideas, but really absorbing themselves in the songs.
  
  Cline brings a lot of variety to his playing, sometimes going for a traditional jazz guitar tone, other times spicing up the sounds with distortion, delay and other effects. The feel of the songs, too, encompasses relatively straight-ahead jazz, slow droning moments and an almost prog-rock bombast (in a good way). The more I listen, the more I get from this remarkable album.

  Ian Douglas Moore
  UCD Advocate [10/11/06]

• 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 incompatible worlds collide but the two genres are probably closer in spirit than you might initially think. And sometimes an over-amplified guitar is applied to old whack jazz classics to wonderful effect, like Otomo Yoshihide's raucous rendition of Eric Dolphy's "Gazzelloni" from last year.

  
  

  Nels Cline is certainly no stranger to conjuring up strange brews like this, either. He and Gregg Bendian even had the balls to cover John Coltrane's Interstellar Space in its entirety back in '99 and while it was perhaps often more avant garde than metal, Cline's Sonny Sharrock freak outs added an edge that made this album stand apart from the original.

  
  

  Now fast forward to the present, and we find Cline again tackling another intractable project, this time a collection of Andrew Hill compositions spanning across much of the pianist's 45 year plus career. Hill is an artist I've got some familiarity with and appreciation for but his melodies for some reason take longer for me to wrap my mind around than most avant garde composers. Maybe because his works often sounded more like compendiums than real songs. I've had Point Of Departure in my CD collection for some 15 years and still can't remember from memory how the basic themes of the songs go.
  
  Similarly, Cline's Hill tribute New Monastery requires real intense listening to truly appreciate and more than a passing familiarity with the originals to know when one song in a medley ends and another begins. That's not necessarily a criticism, it's just to say this ain't no easy listening and it might not grab you on the first listen. But I'll leave an in-depth analysis of the entire album for someone else; the one track that did grab me right off was the last one: "Compulsion".
  
  "Compulsion" originates from Hill's 1965 album of the same name. In Hill's hands the song was, um... well... admittedly I never heard Hill's version. But Cline must have turned that song on its head. His twin brother Alex begins with a 1960's-style rock back beat that pervades most of the song. About thirty seconds in the brief theme is stated by a pocket cornet and bass clarinet before Nels' cacophonous guitar muscles its way in like the coming of the Apocalypse, kicking off a wonderfully dissonant mix of Nels' amped up guitar with sounds of an accordion and the two horns battling for attention. And then like the Beatles' "Helter Skelter", the song comes in for a boisterous crash landing, only to take off again with Bobby Bradford's cornet backed by boisterous percussion and a more jazzy rhythm, followed by Ben Goldberg's bass clarinet. Subtlely, that rock backbeat returns, as does all the other players, until we're back to that stormy free for all from the first section. Suddenly, everyone quits playing except for the drums, the theme is stated once more, and then windup.
  
  This isn't a song about amazing solos, or even creative composition (like I said, it's hard to discern melody from a typical Hill song, save for the short head). It's really more about Cline's ability to throw together an unconventional mixture of instruments and playing styles into something potent. Cranial jazz that you can headbang to... how cool is that?

  Pico
  Blog Critics [10/13/2006]

• 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 music, though. Cline's New Monastery freely interprets compositions from the 70-year-old's wide-ranging oeuvre, including the title track "Dedication" from 1964's riveting Point of Departure to more recent tunes like the haunting "Dance With Death." Far from a typical tribute album, Cline essentially uses the pianist's tricky scores as a springboard for creating something entirely new.

  
  

  The novelty begins with the band leader's arrangement of the pieces, which are often combined into mood-rich suites involving two or three separate titles. Then there's the unusual instrumentation involved: cornet, various clarinets, accordion, electric guitar, acoustic bass, drums, percussion, and considerable electronic effects. The soundscapes evoked by this eclectic electro-acoustic mix are vibrant, contemporary, and edge-of-your-seat compelling. Finally, the sextet's virtuosic players, including Bay Area luminaries (clarinetist Ben Goldberg and drummer Scott Amendola), more than meet the challenges of the music's labyrinthine improv possibilities. Respecting Hill's original vision, a free-feeling, risk-taking energy powers the performances throughout.

  
  

  Next to Cline's ambitious effort, Hill's latest recording, Time Lines, seems relatively tame. But there's still much to recommend: the rare blend of abstraction and earthiness on the title track, the elegant rhythmic propulsion of "Ry Round 1," and the darkness that subverts the quasi-sentimentality of "Whitsuntide." Among the solid showings by the pianist's multigenerational quintet, the leader's own playing stands out for its tortuous melodic phrasing, heavy percussiveness, and quick-shifting rhythms and dynamics.

  
  

  A master composer-improviser, Hill approaches his music with considerable subtlety, which may demand more patience from younger listeners. Thus, Cline's roaring interpretations may be the best bet for the uninitiated.

  Sam Prestianni
  San Francisco Weekly [10/25/06]
• 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 might be surprised to learn that the guitarist is up to the task: His new Hill tribute is both reverent and deeply personal. He lets his clever arrangements and the inspired solos of his West Coast cohorts, including cornet player Bobby Bradford and clarinetist Ben Goldberg, do most of the talking, though fans of his noisier work will be happy to hear tweaked ax squeals peeking through in spots. Cline's key strategy: stringing disparate pieces into ingenious suites.
  Hank Shteamer
  Time Out-New York [9/28/06]

• 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 1960s, his melodic, twisting compositions seemed radical -- despite their consonance as compared to the rest of the avant-garde. It was the deep and gracefully unfolding structures of Hill's works that led them to occupy their very own place in the jazz world. In recent years, many new listeners have caught up with Hill's music, finding for themselves the inherent freshness and exhilaration of his supple and ever-surprising mastery of musical time and space.

  
  

  The assembly here, led by guitarist Nels Cline, is well-qualified to offer what the album’s subtitle claims is "a view into" Hill's music. Cline himself is a gifted guitar texturalist with chops to spare, and he is almost always willing to let those chops take a back seat to the music. Both the superbly multi-faceted clarinetist Ben Goldberg and veteran Bobby Bradford -- heard here on cornet -- have worked with Hill himself, and the experience lends confidence to their command of these challenging works (including classics like "McNeil Island," originally heard on Black Fire, and "New Monastery," from Hills’s 1964 masterpiece Point of Departure).

  
  

  Drummer Scott Amendola and contrabass player Devin Hoff are -- thanks to their work with Cline in the trio Nels Cline Singers -- more than well-aligned with their session leader. Amendola and Hoff are especially impressive here in the way they find, or perhaps create, a perfect sonic space as ensemble players in a music with rhythmic imperatives driven more by melodic motifs and phrasing than by groove. Indeed, the entire ensemble plays close attention to the weave-like motion at the heart of Hill's approach, and thus stays mostly within the composer's conception. Cline himself serves a double role, some times using a traditional warm jazz tone to approximate the part of Hill's darting and gently jabbing piano, at other times cranking up the effects to mangle his tone into pointillist textures and atmospheric splatters.

  
  

  And it is Cline's tasteful and imaginative tone-mangling, especially when in consort with Andrea Parkins' drifting, evocative accordion -- also treated with effects -- that, at least in part, offers the advertised "view into": The microtonal-tinged and complex harmonic density of the electronics seems quite at home in Hill's unique soundworld. These episodes are perhaps the most interesting parts of an almost-always interesting record.

  
  

  Once in a while the ensemble drifts dangerously close to a not-so-fresh-sounding improv frenzy that seems slightly at odds with the precision and clarity of the material. But such sections are few and short, and are ultimately rescued by the quality of the ensemble interaction; it's as if the players quite suddenly, and collectively, come to their senses.

  
  

  It should be mentioned that Bobby Bradford simply shines throughout. His poetic approach to breath and melodic line and the subtly shifting, vocal, expressive tone of his cornet seem to be woven as an integral and crucial part of the music's flow. This is what a master musician sounds like.

  Kevin Macneil Brown
  Dusted [9/24/06]
• 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, the Chicago-born pianist who recently has enjoyed an autumnal career renaissance at age 67 despite a battle with cancer. Cline rearranges Hill's compositions, including Lee Morgan's old jukebox hit "The Rumproller," to feature electronically altered guitar and accordion instead of piano; by applying expressive, idiomatically faithful solos, fluid ensemble work, and novel textures to musically challenging but listenable tunes, Cline delivers one of the best albums of his career.
  William Meyer
  Chicago Tribune [9/29/06]
• 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 that ground is considerable, taking in as it does compositions recorded by Hill over nearly forty years. To hear what is effectively an overview of his music in this way is to be granted an insight into just how true to his own artistic vision he's been.
  
  

  Cline has been incredibly astute in how he's put this band together. Andrea Parkins' accordion is the nearest thing to a keyboard instrument here, and on the likes of "No Doubt/11/8/Dance With Death," her work acts like the catalyst around which the other musicians coalesce. On the same piece they also evoke the stasis of the Belgian band Univers Zero, a comparison that until now was nothing if not unlikely.

  
  

  With the exception of the guitar-clarinet duo with Ben Goldberg on "McNeil Island/Pumpkin," Cline is very much a team player, and his astute use of effects (along with Parkins) lends the music an unworldly air, as on the opening of "Compulsion."

  
  

  An abiding impression is that this is very much a collective endeavour. Having said this, it's the ingredients that the individuals bring to the collective stew that make it so rich. Bobby Bradford's cornet evokes no spirit other than his own, and is by turns both plangent and spooked, as if the band is summoning up spirits of some order apart from the purely musical on "No Doubt…"

  
  

  So all in all this might be an antidote to repertory. It's surely true to say that much of this programme brings to light a strand inherent in Hill's music that he himself has only hinted at on record in the past, and for that alone this set deserves the highest praise. Neither reverent nor insultingly irreverent, this is demanding music to be sure, and large ears are essential to appreciate it.

  Nic Jones
  All About Jazz [9/29/06]

• 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 them as effectively as his own groups, with Mr. Hill on piano. Not even close.

  
  

  But the guitarist Nels Cline has taken up the challenge; New Monastery is a learned and original try. Mr. Cline, who has become more widely known since joining the rock band Wilco two years ago, has a long background in West Coast jazz and experimental music.

  
  

  He is a fast, articulate player, and no slouch on soloing through chord changes, as his version of Mr. Hill's "Reconciliation" proves. He dislodges the melodies from these pieces, bringing them forward with the clarinetist Ben Goldberg, the cornetist Bobby Bradford and the accordionist Andrea Parkins. Mr. Hill's music can be soft and mumbly, but Mr. Cline forces immediacy on it, and frequently leaps beyond a standard jazz guitarist's tone. He distorts his instrument for stabbing, notated chords during someone else's solo; he broadens his tone, putting little rips in it, sounding like Mr. Bradford; he plays a line through a digital processor and repeats it, moving the pitch up and down or making it warp and shimmer.

  
  

  Instead of a pianist the group uses Ms. Parkins on accordion, improvising with fractured aggression. Most of these pieces come from Mr. Hill's mid-1960’s records on Blue Note. With the exception of Mr. Bradford, who was playing semi-free jazz like this in the early 60's, and the occasional Eric Dolphy echo from Mr. Goldberg's bass clarinet, the band doesn't evoke the old records. Mr. Cline can be a fiddly, punctilious musician, even when building clouds of noise in a free improvisation, or when soloing in blues form on "The Rumproller"; it helps him remake the music in his own way.

  Ben Ratcliff
  The New York Times [9/12/06]
• 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 it's altered one's own musical perspective in a deeply personal way, then Cline's homage is one that should please fans of both the aging pianist and the intrepid left coast guitarist. While there are plenty of recognizable elements, Cline's tendency to honor the spirit rather than the letter of Hill's music makes this disc such a rewarding listen.

   

  
  

  Drawing for the most part from Hill's extensive 1960s Blue Note discography, Cline makes the first major step away from close interpretation by removing the key element that has always defined the music: Hill's idiosyncratic pianism. With a sextet that features accordion, clarinet, cornet, bass and drums, Cline completely alters the complexion of even the most straightforward tracks. "McNeil Island," interpreted as a guitar/clarinet duet, retains the chamber jazz vibe of Hill's sax/bass/piano original, as does the more rhythmically charged "Pumpkin," into which it neatly segues.

  
  

  By the time the sextet is halfway through "Not Sa No Sa," however, it's clear that Hill's writing is but a foundation for considerably greater free play. Andrea Parkins' overdriven accordion and Cline's own processed guitar create textures that, combined with bassist Devin Hoff and drummer Scott Amendola's maelstrom-like undercurrent, drive Bobby Bradford and Ben Goldberg's in-tandem cornet/clarinet solo. Cline gradually introduces a repeated phrase that acts as a rallying point, leading into his own unfettered solo over Hoff and Amendola's rapid swing, before breaking down into seemingly complete anarchy. But as the tune nears its end it's clear, with a number of tight punctuations, that there's more arrangement here than meets the ears.

  
  

  A 23-minute medley of the chamber-like "No Doubt," the more open-ended "11/8" and the brooding "Dance With Death" demonstrate just how liberally Cline and his group re-imagine Hill's music. Cline and Parkins' use of effects processing add textural modernity to the material, but what’s equally clear is just how ahead of its time Hill's material was over four decades ago.

  
  

  Even when it's the blues of the "Yokada Yokada/The Rumproller" medley, Cline manages to infuse the music with an off-kilter sensibility that references Hill's quirky mannerisms, but remains wholly familiar to anyone who has followed his own work over the years. With his sextet of highly flexible players, Cline has fashioned an homage that clearly references its source, while at the same time feeling completely within Cline's own musical universe. Hill will no doubt be proud.

  John Kelman
  All About Jazz [9/22/06]
• #7 Top AltJazz CDs for 2006
  
  Nels 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 Parkins on electric accordion and Ornette Coleman alumnus Bobby Bradford on cornet. Set aside 25 minutes, pour yourself a cup of coffee, and listen to the album's phenomenal centerpiece, No Doubt/ 11/8 / Dance With Death.
  John Matouk
  www.About.com [Sept 12, 2006]

• 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 Andrew Hill would seem ripe for deconstructive exploration by contemporary improvisers. But with the exception of a rather schematic quartet blowing date by Anthony Braxton for CIMP in 2000, outcat/prog-rock guitar hero Nels Cline's New Monastery is the first such recorded approach to Hill's iconic repertoire.

  
  

  New Monastery is anything but a cover album. Bringing together bassist Devin Hoff and drummer Scott Amendola from from his longstanding unit, the Nels Cline Singers, occasional West Coast partners Andrea Parkins on accordion and electronics and Ben Goldberg on an array of clarinets, and cornetist Bobby Bradford, Cline takes full advantage of the orchestrational possibilities of this pianoless ensemble of individualists. He finds fascinating voicings that transform the source material while remaining faithful to the composer’s harmonic personality. He also makes intelligent use of juxtaposition strategies, mirroring Hill’s practice of transplanting fragments of motific material from one part of a form to another.

  
  

  The seven tracks include four medleys and draw from 11 Hill pieces, nine composed in the early 1960s and two composed during Hill's East Coast renaissance of the past decade. Only on the concluding blowout, "Compulsion," propelled by Amendola's tribal drums and featuring a stirring sermon from Bradford's laconic coronet, and on "Not Sa No Sa," a '90s Hill tune that branches out from a Monkish (think "Little Rootie Tootie") three-note motif, does the leader skronk out in in a trimbrally extravagant manner. Otherwise Cline orchestrates his stylistic idiosyncrasies into the flow of the arrangements, functioning happily as a prodding, ensemble-oriented comper as often as he solos.

  
  

  Consider the path of the Monk-influences medley "Reconciliation/New Monastery." On the opening section, Cline uncorks a spicily syncopated blues solo. This precedes a cogent Bradford-Goldberg (bass clarinet) dialogue, which devolves into a Cline-prodded rubato Goldberg-Parkins (accordion) call-and-response, before returning to tempo and the concluding theme.

  
  

  He can hew—relatively speaking—to the straight and narrow as well: The "Yokada Yokada/The Rumproller" matchup captures the skittery quality of Hill's brighter-tempo lines, while his lyric declamation on "Dedication" frames a poignant Goldberg bass clarinet solo that counterstates Eric Dolphy's original on Point of Departure. Only the 23-minute centerpiece ("No Doubt/11/8/Dance with Death") seems at all forced or contrived.

  Ted Pankin
  Downbeat [December 2006]