Ben Goldberg - Good Day For Cloud Fishing

August 2019 CD release.

To make “Good Day for Cloud Fishing,” his latest album, the clarinetist Ben Goldberg gathered up the guitarist Nels Cline and the trumpeter Ron Miles — two players with curious minds and patient hands, like his own — and showed them some poems by Dean Young. The trio then played gentle, warmhearted, slowly unspooling music, each piece inspired by a different poem, as Young sat with them in the studio.

Unaware of which poem was guiding them at any given moment, he wrote new verses as he listened. “So now,” Goldberg reflected after the recording session, “we have a new poem which is like the old poem filtered through a song.” But maybe don’t worry about all that: Even if you never knew the conceit, there would be plenty to love about this music. On “Reality” (inspired by Young’s melancholic poem of the same name), hear Goldberg and Cline alternate between embracing and giving each other space, as if their instruments were bodies full of heat and pulse, shyness and desire.