MEDIA SPONSOR

ENSEMBLE

Big Lazy Stephen Ulrich Yuval Lion Andrew Hall Special GuestsSteven Bernstein Michael Dessen

— INTERMISSION —

Nels ClineNels Cline Glen BergerSteven BernsteinAlex ClineDan ClucasMichael DessenBrad Dutz Jeff GauthierBen Goldberg Vinny Golia Devin Hoff Yuka C. Honda Julian LageMichael Leonhart Zeena Parkins Maggie ParkinsJenny ScheinmanSara Schoenbeck Gavin Templeton

Electric guitarC, alto & bass flutes, oboe, English horn, alto sax, Bb clarinet TrumpetDrumsTrumpetTromboneVibraphone, marimba, percussionViolinContra-alto clarinet, Bb clarinetWoodwindsBassCeleste, synthElectric & acoustic guitar, DobroConductor, trumpet, flugelhornHarpCelloViolinBassoonBb clarinet

GuitarsDrumsBass

Slide TrumpetTrombone

Sat, Apr 8 at 8PM Royce Hall

cap.ucla.edu#capucla

RUNNING TIMEBig Lazy

Approximately 50 minutesIntermission

Nels ClineApproximately 90 minutes

Nels ClineMusic from Lovers plus Big Lazy

Photo: Nathan West

ABOUT THE ARTISTS NELS CLINE

A MESSAGE FROM NELS CLINE

In my wildest dreams I never thought that I would be able to record my “concept” album of orchestrated ballads called Lovers, but I did (thanks to some very supportive and generous individuals) and Blue Note Records released it last summer.

Now, perhaps, just as improbable and amazing, I am coming back to my hometown to perform this music at CAP UCLA at Royce Hall — a venue in which I heard many a life-changing concert as a young man. I am bringing a few of my esteemed New York comrades who played on the recording and at the Newport Jazz Festival with me (Julian Lage, Steven Bernstein, Zeena Parkins, Yuka C. Honda, Sara Schoenbeck, and arranger/conductor maestro Michael Leonhart).

The rest of the ensemble reunites me with many of my long-standing West Coast colleagues such as Vinny Golia, Jeff Gauthier, Dan Clucas, Maggie Parkins, Ben Goldberg, Gavin Templeton, Devin Hoff (newly returned from NY to LA), Jenny Scheinman, and my brother Alex Cline — many of whom also played on the record.

PROGRAM

Introduction / DiaphanousBeautiful LoveGlad To Be UnhappyThe Bed We MadeCry, WantLady GaborYou NoticedHairpin & HatboxIn The Wee Small Hours Of The MorningSecret LoveWhy Was I Born?The Night Porter / Max Mon AmourI Have DreamedSnare, GirlSo Hard It Hurts / TouchingThe Search For Cat / The Bond

Nels Cline has been living with Lovers for a long time. “I first thought of it in the ‘80s,” he says. “I would sit on airplanes and make lists of songs, add things and cross things out and make arrows. I always wanted the record to be a somewhat dark and disturbing ‘mood music’ record. My idea was that it would reflect some less-traveled aspects of the idea of romance, love, and sex. It’s gotten a little more upbeat and more varied over time. It has a lot more light in it—as does my life, I suppose, at this point.” Not that Cline, named by Rolling Stone as one of the “100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time,” has had a shortage of things to do. He has led various groups of his own, most consistently the avant-garde ensemble the Nels Cline Singers, and appeared as a guest or feature player on more than 200 albums. In addition, for the last dozen years, he’s been a full-time member of the acclaimed rock band Wilco.

Yet the idea for a “mood music” project that tapped into the sensual, atmospheric sound and feel of a bygone era never stopped calling to him. After bringing it up with various record companiesover the years, it was finally Cline’s friend, poet/producer/protagonist David Breskin, who kept on him about the concept, eventually helping to secure the funding that would make such an ambitious work possible. When Cline met composer/arranger Michael Leonhart, he found a kindred spirit who keyed into such inspirations as Gil Evans, Quincy Jones, Gary McFarland, Johnny Mandel and Henry Mancini, and who Cline believed could help translate the grand dreams inside his head. “I was too daunted by the task,” says the guitarist. “I would have been better at attacking it myself had I done it sooner, but I think it had been built up in my mind way too much. As Michael and I were hanging out, I just knew that he understood what the palette was and what the moods were—that I didn’t want a lot of saxophones, I wanted clarinets and flutes, and that the material was going to be very wide-ranging.” Some of Cline’s initial selections (“Secret Love,” Jimmy Giuffre’s “Cry, Want”) tenaciously stayed on the list. Other songs—from sources as diverse as Sonic Youth, Rodgers and Hammerstein, and Gabor Szabo—plus five of Cline’s own compositions, made their way onto the Lovers line-up over time. Even though they weren’t to be sung, a song’s lyrics were of great importance to Cline. Finally, the team of Cline, Breskin, and Leonhart assembled a group of 23 stellar musicians along with recording engineer Ron Saint Germain to record for five full days, plus an additional day of adding strings and harp. And when Cline looked at all they had accomplished, he discovered layers of meaning that he never anticipated.

“When I put it all together, it started to make more sense,” he says of the 18-track double album. “Before that, it seemed almost absurd in its sprawl. But I saw that, in addition to this specific aesthetic that I feel great love for, it had started to go down an almost chronological path of musical awareness in my own life. First, my awareness of Bill Evans or John Abercrombie, and then, as it gets later in the program, things that represent more of the ‘80s and ‘90s come in, and that’s when I start to bring in some of the darker elements as well. “And then it ends with a piece [“The Bond”] dedicated to my wife—I wasn’t initially thinking it was going to end the record, but if that piece is there, it has to be last. So it became this weird timeline of my aesthetic life, and an emotional story.”

The primary objective of Lovers never really wavered since its initial conception: exploring the frisson resulting from the juxtaposition of the theme from the controversial, transgressive film The Night Porter with something as mellifluous as “I Have Dreamed” from The King and I. (“It always seemed like a bit of a balancing act that I wasn’t sure I could pull off,” says Cline.) But he notes that the final song choices also honor a lifetime of friends and inspirations. “Jim Hall and I became friends in the last few years, and ‘Secret Love’ was really a tribute to him,” he says. “Doing Sonic Youth’s ‘Snare, Girl’ is a tribute to Sonic Youth, of course, but also makes me think of Bollywood music, and of ‘Moonlight Mile’ by the Rolling Stones, for those strings. ‘It Only Has to Happen Once’ by the Ambitious Lovers—I love Arto Lindsay and he’s a big influence on my guitar playing, but that’s also an homage to Marc Ribot, and to how much I was following the scene in New York in the ‘70s, ‘80s, and ‘90s. So once we knew what the pieces were, I realized this wasn’t just a random collection of obsession and inspiration, it was a cool musical program with its own kind of internal logic.” Cline expresses a special passion for “The Search for Cat,” a Henry Mancini composition from Breakfast at Tiffany’s that wasn’t on the soundtrack, didn’t even have a title, but was a music cue in the film that he was infatuated with. “On the record, that’s the piece that catapults you into my real idea of what the record is,” he says. “It has a certain drama, rather than just sweetness or a wan sensibility or feeling. That movie is extremely important to me and my family, and the music is so phenomenal, it’s the kind of writing that I aspire to myself.” As Nels Cline prepares for a few, select live performances of the material on Lovers—including tonight’s performance at UCLA’s Royce Hall—he still sounds amazed that he has actually pulled off this decades-long quest. In the end, it was the recording of one of his own songs that convinced him he had delivered on his vision. “When I heard a piece of mine called ‘Hairpin & Hatbox,’ and I heard the way Michael had orchestrated it, I thought ‘This is really happening!’,” he says. “It really sounds like a record from a certain time, yet it’s my piece. So I was surprised by my own music—and happily surprised that this was all coming out better than I could have dreamt.”

Pictured: Big Lazy

BIG LAZY

New York City’s instrumental trio Big Lazy has thrived for 20 years, creating film music and playing their singular brand of Crime Jazz and Highway Twang from dive bars to The Whitney Museum of American Art. Tonight’s program includes selections from the band’s fifth release, Don’t Cross Myrtle. Myrtle dwells in the landscape of gritty yet elegant noir Americana. With a nod towards classic guitar instrumentals and a fiery performance style that swerves in and out of jazz, the new album captures the essence of the trio’s legendary live shows. Big Lazy creates evocative and cinematic “music to drive back to jail by” (anonymous). “Big Lazy, the elegantly gritty instrumental trio led by the extraordinary guitarist Stephen Ulrich…plays stunningly beautiful music that evokes everything from truckers’ romps to the haunting film scores of Bernard Hermann.” —The New Yorker

“The Big Apple Crème de la Crème. They’re very New York and perfect for a time so more-than-words-can-say.” —Robert Christgau Big Lazy founder Stephen Ulrich (guitar) is the composer for the HBO series Bored to Death, the documentaries Art and Craft and 2017’s Maineland. He studied music in a dusty rehearsal room at the Ed Sullivan theatre in New York City with Bebop guitarist Sal Salvador. He likes Elmer Bernstein and Link Wray. Yuval Lion (drums) has worked and collaborated with David Byrne, Suzanne Vega, Cibo Matto, Meshell Ndgeocello, Chrissie Hynde, Sharon Jones and The Dap Kings and John Zorn.Lion has been an integral part of NYC’s downtown experimental music scene for over a decade. Andrew Hall (bass) studied bass at the New School in Manhattan with Reggie Workman, Cecil McBee and Andy Gonzalez. He’s worked with a wide range of jazz and rock bands including Martha Wainwright, Sparkle Horse (Radiohead tour) and Mark Turner. In the New York scene he’s played with American roots bands Howard Fishman, the Moonlighters, Brain Cloud and Michael Arenella’s Dreamland Orchestra. Big Lazy will be joined by Steven Bernstein tonight by (slide trumpet) and Michael Dessen (trombone).

COMING UP AT CAP

Charles Lloyd & The Marvelsfeatuirng Bill Frisell with Reuben Rogers, Eric Harland and Greg Leisz

Magnetic Fields50 Song Memoir

Toshi Reagon and BIGLovely

Zakir Hussain & Rahul Sharma

Fri, Apr 14

Thur, Apr 27 & Fri, Apr 28

Thur, Apr 27 & Fri, Apr 28

Sat, Apr 29

WELCOME TO LONGING LASTS LONGER!

Please accept my deep appreciation for stepping so far out of the ordinary to attend a Penny Arcade show. Now entering our 25th year of working together, my longtime collaborator Steve Zehentner and I welcome you to my brief analysis of our present day world. With Steve’s help and a lot of the best music from the past 50 years, it’s a cultural critique you can dance to!

I have spent my life observing society from the very edges of it – the best place to get the whole view. I’ve been an improvisational, experimental theatre maker for 48 years, 49 if I count my very first performance. At age 17, I was hoisted into the air by Wavy Gravy at the Electric Circus on St. Mark’s Place and sent crowd surfing onto the stage where Sly and The Family Stone played. I dove back into the audience in what was perhaps the first stage dive in the history of rock ’n’ roll and I was hooked on performance.

When performance art began in the 1950s, it was an exciting auteur-driven, live-action art form. I practice long-form, text-based performance art. My scripts are memorized after months of improvisation, but never rehearsed. This helps the work to be permeable and allows for improvisation during the performance. You will hear people swear that it’s not the same script they heard last week or in another city, but believe me – it is.

The phrase Longing Lasts Longer began in 1997, as a realization I had in my late 40s concerning romance: that longing lasted longer than love, longer than anything else. I created the initial Longing about the end of my very happy 10-year marriage. I soon learned that what had been an investigation into romantic longing was morphing into a focus on cultural longing. Downtown New York was being suburbanized and hypergentrification absorbed more and more of the original, authentic world around me. I had grown through emotional longing, but now my prey was the destruction of culture and erasure of history.

Audiences of all ages shared my concerns. New Yorkers identified with the show, as did people from San Francisco and other global cities that were also under siege. Once gentrification is in place, it creates a kind of domino effect: equal parts blind destruction of neighborhoods and established cultural icons and an equally destructive steamroller of development.

In fall 2014, Steve and I were awarded a fellowship at the highly esteemed MacDowell Colony. For four weeks, we read, discussed ideas, and revisited all of our texts. We consulted with Nicole Koltick, a MacDowell fellow, technologist and internet activist about the very real concerns around technology and World Wide Web freedom. I wrote new material and we returned to New York with a new script and dove straight into six more development performances at Joe’s Pub.

Longing Lasts Longer has continued to evolve through each performance. We are now performing from the 100th script edit of a show that includes 100 music cues, which Steve mixes live during the performance. To date, we have performed Longing in over 160 shows in 22 cities around the world. At the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2015, we were awarded the two top theatre prizes, Herald Angel and Fringe First. Longing audiences always ask for two things: the script to read and the soundtrack to listen to. We hope to be able

to produce a book of Longing Lasts Longer very soon.

During our 25-year collaboration, Steve and I have created hundreds of unique performances, as well as 12 full-length performance plays, many of which continue to tour. Our video oral history project, The Lower East Side Biography Project – Stemming the Tide of Cultural Amnesia, is in its 18th year of continuous weekly broadcasting since 1999. Please feel free to keep in touch. I write to everyone who writes to me at mspennyarcade@gmail.com, www.pennyarcade.tv, pennyarcadenyc, and Twitterpennyarcadesuperstar FB. For more information, visit stevezehentner.com.

– Penny Arcade

COMING UP AT CAP

Charles Lloyd & The Marvelsfeaturing Bill Frisell with Reuben Rogers, Eric Harland and Greg Leiszwith special guest Lucinda Williams

Fri, Apr 14 at 8PM Royce Hall

Toshi Reagon and BIGLovely

Thu, May 4 at 8PM Royce Hall

Zakir Hussain & Rahul Sharma

Sat, Apr 29 at 8PM Royce Hall

Magnetic Fields50 Song Memoir

Thu, Apr 27 at 8PMFri, Apr 28 at 8PM Royce Hall