Covid mask and specs. Squinting down from his stool at a score and 12 effects pedals. How did Nels Cline play guitar without his lenses fogging up?
Accustomed to performing other miracles, Cline wrangled through the 80-some minutes of guitarist-composer Douglas J. Cuomo's Buddhist-ritual tribute "Seven Limbs" with his usual creativity and passion, while interacting spontaneously with the string players of Aizuri Quartet. He made hay from an unusual pairing.
The much-praised Aizuri Quartet interpreted Cuomo's fluid arpeggios and static sustains with calm sensitivity, emphasizing the rarely atonal material's partial debt to Phillip Glass and trespassing infrequently into harsh textures. Together and separately, violinist Emma Frucht, violinist Miho Saigusa, violist Ayane Kozasa and cellist Karen Ouzounian maintained an intuitive balance, whether meditating or romping (with Cline as the bee at the picnic), from opening "Prostration" to final "Beseeching" and "Dedication." Similar themes can be found in John Coltrane's 1965-1967 expressions, but with a more Western emphasis on the strife and suffering that marked their particular moment.
A man who knows his Coltrane, Cline was the right choice to mingle East and West. He began with invitational solo threads on electric guitar, gradually working in more loops, echoes and tonal clashes as first one, then all of the quartet established themselves. His most ingenious touch was to hold back his full crazeology until 50 minutes into the set, when he shook the spiders out of his sleeve, switched to acoustic guitar, stuck a chopstick under his strings and attacked his fretboard with a symphony of pings, thrums and heart-twisting chords as the quartet executed an appropriate background of slow slides.
Cline turned "Beseeching the Spiritual Guides Not To Pass Away" into a sort of "Priest Don't Go" (apologies to Nils Lofgren's Keith Richards plea), suggesting through hard-rocking electric flights of 16th notes that his spiritual guides might include Jimmy Page and John McLaughlin.
The set concluded with Cline slowly plucking a simple downward major scale, each note shaded differently, until he arrived at what normally would have been the octave. He (or Cuomo) substituted a half-step and paused before completing the scale -- a sign that things don't always go where we expect, but we can get there.
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"Seven Limbs" remains available for viewing here through Sun. Feb. 21; free but contributions accepted.