Jazz Articles about Nate Wooley

About Nate Wooley

Year in Review

Karl Ackermann’s Best Releases of 2020

by Karl Ackermann
December 9, 2020

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 ...

Album Review

Nate Wooley: Seven Storey Mountain VI

Read "Seven Storey Mountain VI" reviewed by Jerome Wilson

by Jerome Wilson
November 3, 2020

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 ...

Album Review

Nate Wooley: Seven Storey Mountain VI

Read "Seven Storey Mountain VI" reviewed by Karl Ackermann

by Karl Ackermann
October 31, 2020

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 ...

Album Review

Nate Wooley: Seven Storey Mountain VI

Read "Seven Storey Mountain VI" reviewed by Troy Dostert

by Troy Dostert
October 11, 2020

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 ...

Album Review

Whit Dickey: Morph

by Karl Ackermann
June 26, 2020

Two players on Morph, Matthew Shipp and Nate Wooley, hardly need an introduction to those who venture into free jazz or experimental waters. But the leader, free jazz drummer Whit Dickey, is more of an enigma. Though prolific, his credits are more often in a supporting role. Dickey has been working with Shipp for nearly four decades in David S. Ware's quartet, Shipp's trio and his own projects. The New York native has recorded with Rob Brown, Eri Yamamoto, Daniel ...

Album Review

Paul Lytton / Nate Wooley: Known/Unknown

Read "Known/Unknown" reviewed by Mark Corroto

by Mark Corroto
June 20, 2020

The duo of Paul Lytton and Nate Wooley invites the listener to accompany them down the proverbial rabbit hole, entering a land similar to Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Like Alice's trip through the looking glass, reality (conventional music making) is subverted to produce a disorienting situation. Known/Unknown is the third release from the duo, with their previous efforts Untitled (Editions Brokenresearch, 2008) and Creak Above 33 (psi, 2010) notable additions to the Lytton & Wooley discography, which includes ...

Album Review

Nate Wooley: TTE001: Three Studies for Future Uncertainties

Read "TTE001: Three Studies for Future Uncertainties" reviewed by Karl Ackermann

by Karl Ackermann
June 19, 2020

Trumpeter/composer Nate Wooley has built a catalog of experimental music that has advanced in technique and vision over the past decade. Those years have been benchmarked by The Almond (Pogus Productions, 2011), a single solo track of overlaid trumpet loops that blurred perceptions with its subtle shape-shifting, and Argonautica (Firehouse 12 Records, 2016), a sextet project flooded with gauzy atmospherics and more potent interludes. More recently, Wooley released the four-disc box set The Complete Syllables Music (Self-Produced, 2017), an epic-sized ...