Nels Cline, Eric Von Essen

condition (record/cover): NM / EX (light ring wear on top front)

Before the Wilco years, before the noise records, Nels Cline spent the eighties in Los Angeles playing the most attentive small-group music imaginable, and Eric Von Essen was the bassist he built it with. Elegies is the two of them alone, guitar and bass, working through a set of compositions that owe as much to European chamber writing and to Jimmy Giuffre as to anything in the jazz mainstream. Restraint everywhere, harmonics, long silences, a total refusal to fill space just because it is there. Von Essen died young in 1997 and this record is one of the best arguments for how much was lost.

Original pressing on Nine Winds, Vinny Golia's essential documentation of the West Coast creative music scene. Quiet, serious and almost impossible to find.