Jazz Articles about Nate Wooley

About Nate Wooley

Album Review

Saxophonist & composer Ingrid Laubrock and her partner, drummer Tom Rainey self-released an ongoing series of spontaneous duets, the Stir Crazy Episodes, recorded during the pandemic lockdown. They were most likely a kind of pressure release mechanism for both artists. With Monochromes, Laubrock heads in the opposite direction by commissioning four musicians to pre-record tape pieces based on her notations, both conventional and graphical; these form the foundations for Laubrock and three different collaborations to improvise over. The single 40-minute ...

Album Review

Ivo Perelman / Nate Wooley: Polarity 2

Read "Polarity 2" reviewed by Mark Corroto

by Mark Corroto
September 24, 2023

Polarity 2, the follow up to the first Polarity (Burning Ambulance, 2021) by saxophonist Ivo Perelman and trumpeter Nate Wooley, is the antithesis of its title. Never could it be said the musicians display opposite or contradictory tendencies with this recording. The best you can say is that the two musicians are the opposite sides of the same coin. To say the currency, they trade in is extended technique on their instruments does not do justice to just how revolutionary ...

Radio & Podcasts

Favorite Jazz of 2022

by Jerome Wilson
January 4, 2023

This show looks back at 2022 by playing my favorite jazz recordings of the past year. Musicians featured include Nate Wooley (with his group Columbia Icefield), Hedvig Mollestad, Tyshawn Sorey, Wayne Shorter, and Bill Frisell. Playlist Henry Threadgill Sextett “I Can't Wait Till I Get Home" from The Complete Novus & Columbia Recordings of Henry Threadgill & Air (Mosaic) 00:00 Tyshawn Sorey Trio “Two Over One" from Mesmerism (Yeros7) 1:02 Mary Halvorson “Amaryllis" from Amaryllis (Nonesuch} 8:14 Host ...

Year in Review

Jerome Wilson's Best Jazz Albums Of 2022

by Jerome Wilson
December 10, 2022

2022 was the year that the jazz world seemed to recover from the effects of the pandemic. Musicians went back on tour, festivals reemerged and some artists released multiple albums that were the results of all the involuntary isolation they went through during quarantine. Veteran masters such as Nate Wooley and Charles Lloyd kept up their standards of excellence while a stunning new voice debuted on record, Zoh Amba. A young saxophonist from rural Tennessee, she plays an intensely spiritual ...

Album Review

Columbia Icefield: Ancient Songs of Burlap Heroes

Read "Ancient Songs of Burlap Heroes" reviewed by Jerome Wilson

by Jerome Wilson
September 11, 2022

Trumpeter Nate Wooley can create impressive large-scale compositions. His Seven Storey Mountain VI, (Pyroclastic, 2021) is a massive work, dealing with the rights of women, that used fourteen musicians and singers. His group, Columbia Icefield, achieves similar results with just four members, Wooley himself on trumpet and amplifier, Mary Halvorson on electric guitar, Susan Alcorn on pedal steel guitar and Ryan Sawyer on drums plus Mat Maneri and Trevor Dunn guesting on some tracks. This music moves at a glacial ...

Album Review

Columbia Icefield: Ancient Songs of Burlap Heroes

Read "Ancient Songs of Burlap Heroes" reviewed by Troy Dostert

by Troy Dostert
August 19, 2022

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 ...

Album Review

Nate Wooley: Mutual Aid Music

Read "Mutual Aid Music" reviewed by John Sharpe

by John Sharpe
September 28, 2021

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 ...