Heartwood and Pulp Presents: Nels Cline- Gerald Cleaver-Larry Ochs

Join us on April 12th at the Heartwood soundstage for a night of improvised music from the trio of living legends that is Nels Cline, Gerald Cleaver, and Larry Ochs.

Guitar explorer NELS CLINE is best known these days as the lead guitarist in the band Wilco. His recording and performing career – spanning jazz, rock, punk and experimental – is well into its fourth decade, with over 200 recordings, including at least 30 for which he is leader. Cline has received many accolades including Rolling Stone anointing him as both one of 20 “new guitar gods” and one of the top 100 guitarists of all time. Cline’s most recent release, Lovers, out now on Blue Note Records, is a collection of “mood music” over 20 years in the making. Beyond Wilco, Cline performs in a duo project with jazz guitar prodigy Julian Lage in addition to a quartet The Nels Cline Four (that includes Lage plus bassist Scott Colley and drummer Tom Rainey. Cline also performs in CUP, a duo with wife and musical collaborator Yuka Honda (Cibo Matto) and leads The Nels Cline Singers (featuring Scott Amendola, bassist Trevor Dunn and Cyro Baptista). www.nelscline.com

GERALD CLEAVER (drums) is a product of Detroit’s rich music tradition. Inspired by his father, drummer John Cleaver, he began playing the drums at an early age and, as a teenager, gained invaluable experience playing with Detroit jazz masters Ali Muhammad Jackson, Lamont Hamilton, Earl Van Riper and Pancho Hagood. While majoring in music education at the University of Michigan, he was awarded a Jazz Study Grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to study with drummer Victor Lewis. After graduation, he began teaching in Detroit, where he worked with Rodney Whitaker, Marcus Belgrave, Donald Walden and with visiting musicians Hank Jones, Tommy Flanagan, Barry Harris, Kenny Burrell, Frank Foster, Ray Bryant, Eddie Harris, Diana Krall and Don Byron. In 1995 he accepted an appointment as assistant professor of Jazz Studies at the University of Michigan, and in 1998 also joined the jazz faculty at Michigan State University. He moved to New York in 2002. He has performed or recorded with Roscoe Mitchell, Matt Shipp, William Parker, Craig Taborn, Charles Gayle, Jeremy Pelt, Tomasz Stanko, Charles Lloyd and Miroslav Vitous, among others. Cleaver has released four recordings as a leader and leads the bands Black Host and Uncle June.

LARRY OCHS (saxophones) is best known as a founder of the Rova Sax Quartet, a San Francisco institution that focused right from the start on the application of improvisational strategies within the context of contemporary compositions, beginning in the late 1970s and continuing right up to the present day; 40 years old in 2018. Equally inspired by modernist 20th century composition and the more worldly, abrasive strands of 60s free jazz as well as by fellow pioneers around the globe, Rova and Ochs became widely celebrated for the lengths they would go to stretch the performance parameters of notated music through early collaborations with Henry Kaiser, Anthony Braxton, and John Zorn. Ochs connection with Cline began in the late 1990’s and culminated with the Celestial Septet, a band comprised of both Rova and the “Nels Cline Singers,” with a fantastic CD release (New World Records) including a long, ecstatic Ochs composition, as well as tours from 2009 – 2011. Ochs and Cleaver have performed off and on as a duo since 2013. A duo CD release – a beautiful , haunting set of music called “Songs of the Wild Cave” (Nov. 2018) – documents their 2016 live-recording experience inside a secret cave in the Dordogne area of France; a cave that contains upwards of 150 Pleistocene-era paintings. It’s a unique recording in which the cave itself seriously influenced the music, becoming essentially the third member of a trio. Ochs’ many other bands and a select discography can be perused and heard at www.ochs.cc

Local Support from Family Portrait:

Robert Edmundson, Eric Lanham, and Ryan O’ Malley

Heartwood Soundstage
619 South Main Street
Gainesville, FL
https://heartwoodsoundstage.com/

Tickets:
$15 Students and Friends of Heartwood
$20 Advance
$25 Day of show

8:00PM