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Jazz Articles about Nate Wooley
Columbia Icefield: Ancient Songs of Burlap Heroes
by Troy Dostert
Nate Wooley refuses to make trivial music. Whether the endlessly creative trumpeter and composer is rethinking the relationship between artistic production and community, as on Mutual Aid Music (Pleasure of the Text, 2021), or pursuing ways to re-envision music's spiritual potential, seen most recently on 2020's Seven Storey Mountain VI (Pyroclastic Records), he always provides his listeners with a lot to ponder. This is no less evident with his Columbia Icefield project, which dives headlong into humankind's fraught relationship with ...
Continue ReadingNate Wooley: Mutual Aid Music
by John Sharpe
With Mutual Aid Music, trumpeter Nate Wooley expands the ideas that underlay his Battle Piece series, (heard on three albums on Relative Pitch Records from 2015, 2017 and 2019) to produce a double CD which absorbs and enthralls. To the original cast of accomplished improvisers, comprising saxophonist Ingrid Laubrock, vibraphonist Matt Moran and pianist Sylvie Courvoisier, Wooley adds four players, who hail from contemporary classical backgrounds. Of these, pianist Cory Smythe has had the greatest exposure to jazz audiences, not ...
Continue ReadingNate Wooley / Liudas Mockunas / Barry Guy / Arkadijus Gotesmanas: Nox
by John Sharpe
Nox presents a four-piece uniting two of Lithuania's finest improvisers, reedman Liudas Mockunas and drummer Arkadijus Gotesmanas, with two world class instrumentalists, trumpeter Nate Wooley and bassist Barry Guy. Recorded at the 2019 Improdimensions Festival in Vilnius, the limited edition LP (also available as a download) contains three collectively sculpted tracks, demonstrating a unity of purpose which belies their off-the-wall genesis. Gotesmanas' spare non-metric clatter and acute punctuation plays a defining role, enabling a transparent sound which ...
Continue ReadingKarl Ackermann’s Best Releases of 2020
by Karl Ackermann
2020 abridged: A staggering loss of lives and livelihoods. We had worldwide social unrest, wildfires, locust swarms of Biblical proportions, killer hornets, killer drones, kids in cages; an impeachment, an election, an attempted insurrection. Oh, and Poland accidentally invaded the Czech Republic. It was not exactly the Gilded Age. Yet, amid doom-scrolling, the creative music community did its best to adjust to the chaos, uncertainty, and isolation and produced more excellent recordings than in any year in recent memory. Music ...
Continue ReadingNate Wooley: Seven Storey Mountain VI
by Jerome Wilson
Since 2007 trumpeter Nate Wooley has been producing compositions in a song cycle collectively called “Seven Storey Mountain." The first one was performed by a trio and each succeeding version has included a greater number of musicians. The newest one, the sixth of an eventual seven iterations, is performed here by fourteen players including three vocalists. It is a compelling and heart-wrenching musical epic. one uninterrupted 45-minute piece which combines pre-recorded tapes and live performance. Part of the ...
Continue ReadingNate Wooley: Seven Storey Mountain VI
by Karl Ackermann
From 2010 onwards, composer-trumpeter Nate Wooley has explored creative music as a solo artist and through a spectrum of collaborators such as Ingebrigt Håker Flaten, Mary Halvorson, Ken Vandermark, and Matthew Shipp. These projects have been offset by Wooley's Seven Storey Mountain succession of releases; Seven Storey Mountain VI is a masterwork of expressionist passion and discord, taking the series to a new level. The sound that Wooley debuted in 2009 was compact in scale, with drummer Paul ...
Continue ReadingNate Wooley: Seven Storey Mountain VI
by Troy Dostert
Long considered one of the most innovative and idiosyncratic trumpeters in the improvised music community, Nate Wooley has for many years astonished listeners with his formidable technique and broad-minded vision. Nowhere is this more evident than in his Seven Storey Mountain series, a sequence of recordings going back to 2007 that is now in its sixth iteration. With an ever-expanding cast of associates who share Wooley's iconoclasm, this is improvised music of a distinctive and ambitious character, determined to bridge ...
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