Nels Cline and Yuka Honda on Musical Worlds, Collaboration, and Yoko Ono

In advance of their exclusive two-night Walker collaboration, Nels Cline and Yuka Honda spoke with Nate Chinen about collaboration and creative partnership, their plans for River Mouth, Unseen Green, and Yoko Ono’s artistic legacy and activism as celebrated in Yuka and and Glenn Kaino’s forthcoming I Am Yoko opera.

Nate Chinen: Yuka and Nels, this two-day residency looks like an incredibly fun time. It reminds me that there are so many ways to describe the work that you do, but one of the words that comes to mind immediately is “collaborator.” You’re both just prolific, intense, and inspired collaborators. And I thought I’d begin by asking a purposefully vague question: How do you think of collaboration? What is the point of it? What does it give you, and what do you bring to it?

Nels Cline: It’s not really a vague question. It’s a multifaceted question, and I agree that Yuka and I are both highly collaborative. I think that music in general is inherently collaborative. I live for it; I don’t know what I bring to it except the desire to do it and the satisfaction of attempting it. It makes me feel like I’m me. I don’t like playing by myself. I do it to challenge myself, or more often because people ask me to, but it’s an exercise in terror. I feel that I’m in a natural state when I’m collaborating with somebody, meeting them more than halfwy to play their compositions or follow their instructions or, even more happily for me, spontaneously improvising with like-minded individuals and going into a unique sound world that only we can create in the moment.

Yuka Honda: In synthesizer terms, solo work is like we’re emitting our own frequency and our own vibration. When we collaborate, when other frequencies get involved, the modulation happens, and it’s exciting to discover what happens. I really love cooking, and it’s like a cooking experiment: you add something, and then all this magic happens. Solo work is also interesting for me because it is a challenge, like Nels said, to go inside, and it’s as exciting as it is terrifying. Collaboration is a completely different way to do music that helps us expand beyond what we normally do. Our solo worlds change through collaboration.

Chinen: There are some people in this cast of characters you’ve convened for the Walker residency who are chameleonic—Theo Bleckmann, for instance. But there’s also the other side of it, which is an extremely strong voice, an unmistakable identity that is expressed. I think everyone that you’ve invited has this instantly recognizable energy. Is that a balance, the ability to disappear into a setting, to blend in or camouflage, but then also still maintain that strong identity?

Cline: I consider myself happiest when I’m disappearing into some kind of musical or sonic realm. It’s fun to emerge periodically, I guess, with an identifiable musical character, but I don’t really think about it much. It’s more about fitting into a larger framework.

Chinen: I want to start with Thursday night, because as I look at this assemblage, I’m curious about the sound world or worlds that are going to be created. We have Theo Bleckmann, Alex Cline on drums, Anthony Cox on bass, John Dieterich on guitar, Glenn Kotche on drums, Julian Lage on guitar, and Shara Nova on vocals. This is the definition of an all-star team, and these are all fearless creators, improvisers. Can you articulate the concept or the strategy that you want to bring to this assemblage?

Cline: It came together in my mind quickly when I saw the vast possibilities provided by the good people at the Walker and considered what Yuka was working toward.
I’m only going to bring a handful of songs that really moved me recently to the show. But I mean, one of them is really old; it’s a Minutemen song. I’ve asked Theo to do his haunting version of “Comedy Tonight.” I’ve asked Shara Nova to play “I’ve Never Loved Someone,” which is an amazing ballad, very inspiring, and makes me cry every time. Then a Tedeschi Trucks Band song called “Hold That Line” that got me through the lockdown period, but I’ve also selected it for Minneapolis and the world at large in their struggles this year, which have been so overwhelming and so upsetting.

I want to send a little message from this very mellow and meditative song by Tedeschi Trucks and then give people short solo spots to do whatever they want improvising. The idea is that the ensemble comes and goes, people play solo, and it flows along. With any luck, it really might feel lovely and vast.

Chinen: You alluded to what Minneapolis has been going through. This is something I talked about at the beginning of this year with Dave King and Reid Anderson of The Bad Plus, how what we’ve seen in Minnesota and Minneapolis really showed the best of humanity. I found it very moving to see how people responded to extraordinary pressure. Instead of turning to their more fearful or darker instincts, they stepped up and looked out for each other. That feels like an aspirational model that is very relevant to how you make music.

Cline: It seems like some people perceive cooperation as compromise or weakness when, really, what we want is a society where we support and take care of each other. In musical collaboration, at its best, you’re surrounded by people who approach music making with great care and still maintain their identities. I think maybe we should not clutch so tightly at the much-vaunted individual and instead look toward a society where we’re still ourselves but we cooperate and we care about others.

I think of my home state of California going through a very serious drought when I was growing up, and the state government said, “Here’s what you have to do to save water,” and everyone did it. But this last time (I wasn’t in California for this; I was observing it from afar), people said, “No, I can water my lawn if I want to. It’s my lawn.” I just think, “Wow, that’s really selfish and bridging on stupid.” Seeing people come together nonviolently and steadfastly, I guess it does have a parallel in our musical creative world, but it’s a far more arduous endeavor and actually dangerous. So, hats off to these brave people.

Chinen: Yuka, on Friday night, you are working with a different set of collaborators, and there’s one important collaborator who is sort of not, but actually fully, present: Yoko Ono. As we’re talking about these ideas of resistance and resilience and transformation, it feels like this is totally relevant to what she has been about for years. I’d love to hear you talk about where you see that and how it’s going to be expressed.

Honda: This is a great time to really think about Yoko’s message. She was very active in the ‘60s, the ‘70s, and we know of her activism, but I think that we are tapping into her now more than ever. Her activism was unique, if you listen to her music and what she had said. She’s not just talking about “this is wrong and we should fight it.” We tend to think about fighting as a method to eliminate opponents. When we see a movie, we eliminate the bad guy at the end and everything is solved, but that’s not how the world works.

Let’s say that we succeeded in getting rid of that value from this world. Is its absence enough to produce a peaceful world? I do not think so. We would just start fighting again, internally now, if our mentality is to fight. But I think what Yoko was talking about was peace not as an absence of fight but as something that we need to actively conceive and achieve. It takes a lot of serious, conscious work. It’s harder to absorb than a black-and-white message to go, fight, and win. This is the time that we remember that we’re human and we’re not binary, the answer is not just black and white. Yoko’s message was a little bit difficult to understand in the ‘70s because we were just emerging from a super-conservative world, and a “fight, fight, fight” energy was important to changing that world. But she was thinking ahead because she knew about fighting and the destruction it can bring.

I’m very excited and terrified to have this work try to explain this, but I’m feeling a lot of connection to people.

Chinen: I really respond to this idea that peace is not just an absence of conflict; that it is an active state. It requires maintenance, support, and full involvement. And this strikes me as important and as difficult to understand today as it was in the ‘70s.

Let’s talk about your I Am Yoko opera, the collaboration with Glenn Kaino. Can you start with the genesis of this project?

Honda: I noticed that everybody knows Yoko’s name—she’s probably one of the most famous Asian figures—and most people don’t know anything about her. They just see her as this alien being who sings funny or may have broken up The Beatles; people use her name as an adjective to trash something. It’s interesting that there isn’t more curiosity about her. How could a woman break up fully grown men who are doing so well, for example? It’s intriguing, but nobody wonders. Originally, I wanted to do a multimedia presentation with nine pavilions you walk through, but now it’s a long movie. I’m really struggling to make this into a 90-minute piece because just to talk about her life takes 120 minutes. This person that you really feel like you know has all these fascinating layers.

I approached Glenn Kaino because I wanted to team up with someone who has experience with bigger installations. I realized that Glenn Kaino is perfect because he’s of Japanese descent and his work reminds me of Yoko because he’s an activist. He has this activist bent, but his pieces are very simple and beautiful. There’s serious aesthetic value that contains a lot of meaning, like haiku: very condensed messages in beautiful form.

We’ve been dreaming about this for a few years and decided to do a musical or opera of some sort.

Chinen: There’s something so fundamentally experiential about that initial idea to create these pavilions, and it feels very congruent with Yoko Ono’s art. So many of her pieces involve the audience; there’s a tremendous sense of invitation. How have you taken that impulse toward experiential understanding and brought it into the musical frame?

Honda: Before I got into music, I was a huge musical fan. I was really into Pippin, and I listened to that album a hundred times. Nels knows that I can sing along with every song. I performed in A Chorus Line when I was in high school. But I’m also really interested in sensory communication. I started to perform solo pieces over the last few years. They are 40 minutes of continuous music, and what I’m trying to create is an arc that tells a story. There’s up and down and hold and release, and I try to do all these things as if I’m writing a story with music.

While I want to communicate all these facts about Yoko’s life, I’m also creating this challenge for myself. I guess I like to torture myself. It’s a part of my creative process that I want to communicate all this information, but I still want it to be sensory. I want to use music, but I want it to be a little bit off from the conventional musical format. It may develop into something else eventually, but I still really want to communicate with people through music.

I was really fortunate to have great musicians to perform with me, and I want this experience to be sensory, so you feel—as opposed to learn—Yoko’s life.

Chinen: I’m glad that you mentioned the biases and misperceptions around Yoko Ono, because they’re so stark and obviously unfair, and it has lasted such a long time.

We’re speaking in September; the world is about to observe John Coltrane’s centennial, and we just celebrated Alice Coltrane’s birthday. As someone operating in a jazz space, I see a direct parallel between Alice Coltrane and Yoko Ono: both were eclipsed by their association with a great artist, even though they were fully collaborative with that artist. Then they were both really involved in carrying a legacy forward, representing their late husbands’ work, but being maligned and misunderstood because of, in Alice’s case, all the spiritual involvement and, in Yoko’s case, her avant-garde artistic expression.

I’m especially interested in how the John and Alice Coltrane parallel resonates with you, Nels. What can we learn from this when the world seems to be finally coming around to understanding what Yoko Ono is about and what Alice Coltrane was about? What can you say about this dynamic?

Honda: I don’t understand why this dynamic happens, so I don’t know how to explain it. We’re trying to fight it, obviously. We’re trying to acknowledge these women as they are, and I don’t know why people can’t. I don’t know if it’s fear. I understand the tradition; it’s a social structure that doesn’t approve of women in that way. We are just updating the version, and maybe there’s some basic structure that’s still affecting us that we haven’t been able to modify.

Cline: I didn’t grow up with this bias against either Yoko or Alice because I always thought that they were important and fascinating artists. But obviously we’ve been dealing with the patriarchy and these structures for a very long time in most societies. But the flip side of it, if you want to look at it as progress, Asian women are owning pop music at this point. And the world is fascinated by these young artists who quite often aren’t even singing in English.

I’m not saying that they’re artistically commensurate with Alice or Yoko, but we are, I think, experiencing a change in perception on a large scale. We have Yoko’s re-emergence in this more recognizable traveling show that allows people to assess the totality of her work, not just one little aspect that maybe they were barely aware of. It’s all part of a positive direction for society in general.

Honda: This is a super generalization, but I think women today do well if they speak a “male” language. So Asian pop stars are doing well, but they’re all speaking male language. They’re feeding this male logic and understanding of the world. And people like Alice Coltrane and Yoko Ono have this other, less-compatible language. I do think that this “woman language,” let’s say, is a little bit harder to understand.

It’s more intuition and atmosphere. I think that’s why people dismissed Alice Coltrane or Yoko Ono because they have this thing that you don’t understand and then you call it “spiritual” or “esoteric.” I have it too, but I don’t put it up front. I observe it in female musicians. Some people have this incredible intuition, but they will be more successful if they speak male language and do a little bit more of this chalk chords, melody thing.

Which is cool, too; I really believe in crossover and modulating and influencing each other.

Chinen: We haven’t mentioned everyone who is going to be involved on Friday night. Who else is in the ensemble?

Honda: Theo Bleckmann, as you mentioned, very excited to have him. Such an incredible singer. I have only great people. Macie Stewart from Chicago, she’s a part of Finom. Finom is two genius women singing genius things, and I love this band. Macie is an incredible singer, versatile, and a very soulful person. Alex Toth is playing John Lennon. He’s an incredible singer, composer, performer. Emi Helfrich, she doesn’t really want this to be up front, but she’s a granddaughter of Yoko. I’m very fortunate to have spent time with Ono’s family, and I’ve known Emi since she was born. She’s grown up to be this incredible singer. She’s going to play Kyoko, her mother.

Glenn Kaino is in it. He’s, of course, one of the artists that I admire a lot. Then, on the music side, there are Nels and Alex, golden twins of the music, and Maggie Parkins, incredible cello player. I’ve always wanted to perform with her. I met her when she was on Alex Cline’s solo album. I got to play on it, and we were at the recording session for a few days together. And every time she played, I lost my mind. It was so beautiful. Ever since then, I’ve been dreaming to work with her.

Jason Lindner is a great friend of mine. We do a lot of electronic, underground shows and music festivals together. I not only love his playing, but I also really love him as a person. I guess I have been around, so I’ve figured out that it’s very important to have great people spiritually, and the music will thrive.

Chinen: The opera is titled I Am Yoko, and I saw a clip that The Broad posted where various people in the ensemble face the camera and say, “I am Yoko.” Can you explain the power of inhabiting that perspective and not just saying “I like Yoko” or “I respect Yoko” but “I am Yoko Ono”?

Honda: I find that phrase to be powerful for the reason that you just said. The interesting thing about Yoko is that people put her so far away from themselves as if she’s an alien. She’s not even a member of the human species. But her story is such a human story. It’s a person who has a calling, who was born with something and not fitting in the world and had all this crazy fate playing with her. She has lived this really intense life, and there are all sorts of elements that we can relate to. You may not have married into The Beatles, but you may relate to going through all this struggle with the person you love.

People pay attention to where she’s so different from us, so I wanted to bring attention to where she is the same with this phrase, “I am Yoko.”

Chinen: I want to turn the focus on the two of you, because I have had the great pleasure and privilege of watching your creative collaboration over the years. What has your alchemy as creative spirits done for each of you? How are you changed? How are you different because of this collaboration?

Honda: Nels is the biggest influence on me now because we’ve been together for so long, 17 years. More influence comes from our daily conversations than playing music together. I think that’s where we step closer toward each other because we do come from very different worlds of music. A lot of collaboration is based on music that we play for each other. Our house is in the country, so we have a lot of time driving together, which is a great opportunity to listen to music, and we exchange what we feel about it and influence each other.

Cline: As somebody who’s listened to and observed Yuka’s music and her process with great interest and great respect, there’s something I think is revealed in what she has said today, which is a philosophical bent, a worldview, a type of wisdom and insight that I find inspiring and informative. It challenges me to be more engaged and better at being me. That’s a great gift.

Chinen: I love bearing witness to this mutual inspiration. If someone was coming from the outside and saying, “Oh, Nels, you have had an opportunity to watch Yuka work in various circumstances on different kinds of projects with different people,” what is the thing that people might not know about her process or her artistic engine? And then I would ask you, Yuka, the same question.

Cline: I’m not sure that it’s evident when you hear Yuka’s music how intuitive yet harmonically curious and advanced her music world is. What people might not know is how incredibly meticulous and focused on creativity to the point of exhaustion Yuka is when she’s working. I do everything pretty fast and move forward kind of blithely. Sometimes I look back and go, “Why was I feeling so confident about that? That was a bad decision.” Yuka is extremely methodical, and it’s a very long process to get what we hear. There’s been a lot of consideration, perhaps more than meets the ear.

Honda: We come from very different places. Like Nels said, I spend a lot of time experimenting on my music, and it takes a really long time for me to do one thing. And Nels works in this way that is so mysterious to me; I still haven’t figured it out. I can’t tell when he’s writing music. During the pandemic, we were in this small, rented house in the woods. We were just alone, and I really felt like I knew what he was doing 24 hours a day. But he was writing an album, and I didn’t know. I don’t know how that happened, but I guess he works very fast. He’s able to make all the music in his head—I guess that’s how jazz musicians work—and then he writes these charts. He’s doing them really fast, or he’s doing them in a bathroom hiding from me. I don’t know.

Cline: I’m just very quiet. I don’t really do it all in my head. I need a guitar, but I don’t need to hear much sound. Yuka’s world ideally requires speakers, headphones, some kind of apprehensible source that people probably can hear through a door. I just plink and plunk on a guitar. I don’t need to plug in. It’s all about the notes and chords and how it will eventually apply to the individuals who will play it and how we will improvise on it.

Chinen: What I love about each of your answers is that there’s a sense that each of you is still kind of mystified by the other. You understand the process and know how to support it, but it’s still fundamentally completely mysterious. That just feels like the best, and if that can be carried forward in the music, that’s even better. Yuka, it reminds me of something that you said in an interview. You were talking about various inspirations and you said, “I believe in science, but I also believe in love.” That just felt like a very emblematic statement that I could apply to both of you in terms of process and how you work and how you experience art as well.