Drummer/composer Ches Smith debuts his inventive new two-guitar quartet – featuring Mary Halvorson, Liberty Ellman and bassist Nick Dunston – on the striking new album Clone Row, out June 6 on Otherly Love Records
Anyone who has paid attention to the creative music scene over the last couple of decades might be tempted to suspect that Ches Smith has cloned himself a few times over. It’s sometimes hard to believe that a single person could accomplish the dizzying breadth and wide-ranging invention of the drummer/composer’s prolific career.
It might take two or three versions of Smith just to handle the demands for his distinctive drumming as a collaborator with such singular artists as Marc Ribot, Tim Berne, John Zorn, Bill Frisell, Nels Cline, Darius Jones, James Brandon Lewis, Vijay Iyer, John Tchicai, Dave Holland, David Torn, Terry Riley, Kris Davis, Trevor Dunn, Xiu Xiu, and Secret Chiefs 3.
Another Smith might pursue the deep study of Haitian V odou music explored on two acclaimed albums by his ensemble We All Break, while a more introspective clone plays on the sparse, investigatory trio albums with violist Mat Maneri and pianist Craig Taborn. Another is locked away to craft the electro-acoustic solo project Congs for Brums. Then a slightly mutated iteration could conjure the uncategorizable mash-ups of 2024’s Laugh Ash, hailed by PopMatters for representing jazz’s “ability to gobble up other styles and turn them into art.”
That all of these eclectic Ches Smiths can coexist in the space of one singularly original, albeit dauntingly prolific, artist is nowhere more vividly apparent than on Clone Row, Smith’s exhilarating new release out June 6, 2025 via Otherly Love Records. The album debuts an adventurous new quartet featuring guitarists Mary Halvorson and Liberty Ellman and bassist Nick Dunston. As a composer, Smith finds endless possibilities in this seemingly limited instrumentation, weaving together varied threads from his divergent earlier projects in ways that sound not quite like any of them.
“This definitely ain’t your father’s guitar band,” writes no less an expert on six-string subversion than Marc Ribot, who penned the album’s liner notes. “It’s as if I’m hearing a Jim Hall concert in which one of us did a lot of mushrooms, or… some post-punk post-Dave Brubeck post-trip-hop experiment with classical form.”
The title Clone Row is, at its simplest, a pun; a play on “tone row,” that revolutionarily restrictive compositional method made famous by Arnold Schoenberg. While only the title track is built on a twelve-tone row, the altered name suggests Smith’s tendency to set himself challenges with each new piece, while hinting at the playful imagination and warped perspective that characterizes his remarkable work.
“You can make so much from so little,” Smith says. “In a lot of the music I’ve studied, from the Western art music of Beethoven and stuff to Haitian V odou drumming, you can always trace things back to very minimal elements. It’s all contained within a few notes, and I’ve always been interested in that idea.”
Clone Row also gestures to the doubling that occurs throughout the quartet. There are the two guitars, pairing the wildly different but inspiringly complementary voices of Halvorson and Ellman. Then there are the acoustic/electronic parallels, with Smith doubling on acoustic drums and drum machines and Dunston on acoustic and analog synth bass. Smith and Dunston also share a pool of samples that they can deploy in sympathy or in contrast with one another, making for uncanny echoes and dissonant collisions.
The musicians on Clone Row represent a mix of rich history and fresh encounters. Smith and Halvorson share a collaborative relationship dating back more than 20 years. Smith was just beginning to emerge onto the Bay Area creative music scene when he became aware of Ellman, already a vital player with the likes of Vijay Iyer, Devra Hoff and others. It was many years later before they would begin to play together in bands led by Matana Roberts and Myra Melford. Dunston and Smith hadn’t worked together before this quartet first convened in 2019 (he later also joined We All Break), but Smith had kept close watch on the bassist’s emergence to become a striking voice as a player, composer and improviser.
Where We All Break and Laugh Ash boasted large ensembles with ambitious concepts and compositions, Clone Row was deliberately devised to spotlight four composer-improvisers who could transform and evolve Smith’s tantalizing musical instigations.
“I wanted to create the most full spectrum music I could with the smallest amount of people,” Smith concludes. “Each particular tune is its own sound world and can exist in many different versions. I’m looking forward to going on the road and breaking all that music apart.”

LABEL:

ALBUM: Clone Row

RELEASE DATE: June 6th, 2025

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