Nels Cline’s Consentrik Quartet Announces Debut Album

“[Consentrik Quartet is] much more of a jazz group, if I dare use that word.” – Nels Cline

By Nate Todd Jan 15, 2025 9:26 am PST

Guitarist Nels Cline is launching a new group, Consentrik Quartet, whose self-titled debut album arrives on March 14 via Blue Note Records. Cline previewed the LP with lead single, “The 23.”

Consentrik Quartet is Cline, saxophonist Ingrid Laubrock, bassist Chris Lightcap and drummer Tom Rainey. The new band is “much more of a jazz group, if I dare use that word,” Nels stated. “I wanted to have the music reflect the players, and have the players come forth so that everybody is able to hear them and enjoy their lucidity and their mastery.”

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Cline raved about his bandmates. Husband and wife team Tom Rainey and Ingrid Laubrock lead their own group and also figure into Mary Halvorson’s octet. Here’s Cline on hearing Laubrock in Halvorson’s outfit.

“I heard her negotiating these perplexing chord changes in that band, with this amazing combination of great facility but also a kind of intimacy,” he said “Honestly, when I listen to her playing on the Consentrik record, I’m consistently blown away. To me, it sounds like it’s her record because of how she shines.”

“I’ve got one of the greatest drummers on the planet in the band,” Cline added on Rainey.

Finding time between his work with Wilco and his Nels Cline Singers, the guitarist’s Consentrik Quartet has been half a decade in the making. Cline first assembled the husband and wife team of Laubrock and Rainey along with Lightcap six years ago for an improvisational set at the John Zorn-owned Brooklyn spot, The Stone.

While bolstered by a grant from Philadelphia’s Ars Nova Workshop to create his new project, Mother Nature had other plans. “And then the pandemic hit,” Cline said. Relocating from Brooklyn to Upstate New York during quarantine, Cline used the time to write much of the material on Consentrik Quartet.

“Suddenly, we were enveloped in silence,” Cline recalled on moving out the the city. He also detailed the aesthetic he set out to create with the project.

“Initially, for myself anyway, my sonic palette, I was looking at a more conservative approach—a little more traditional, I guess you’d say. Over time, I found myself looping and writing funkier grooving tunes.”

Case in point, lead single “The 23.” Listen below:

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Consentrik Quartet will celebrate the release of their self-titled debut album with a performance at the Big Ears Festival in Knoxville, Tennessee. Scroll down for Nels Cline’s itinerary with ticket info.

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