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Karl 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 ...
read moreNate 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 ...
read moreNate 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 ...
read moreNate 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 ...
read moreNate Wooley: TTE001: Three Studies for Future Uncertainties
by Karl Ackermann
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 ...
read moreA focus on Nate Wooley
by Bob Osborne
This time around we focus on trumpeter Nate Wooley. This episode also features a couple of tracks from Fabian Arends and a selection of recent releases and archive cuts. Playlist Ryan Keberle & Catharsis “Para Volar" from The Hope I Hold (Greenleaf) 00:00 Jeong Lim Yang “Moon Tethered" from Déjà Vu (Fresh Sound New Talent) 07:05 Sarathy Korwar “City of Words (feat. TRAP POJU & Mirande)" from More Arriving (Leaf) 13:55 Nate Wooley Sextet “Plow" from (Sit ...
read moreNate Wooley: Columbia Icefield
by Don Phipps
Nate Wooley's Columbia Icefield begins with a dueling repetition of chords by bandmates Mary Halvorson and Susan Alcorn on “Lionel Trilling." The ambiguity generated by this back and forth is the perfect start to his album's shape-shifting music. Wooley's trumpet is both poetic and piercing. There's a sense of longing in his tone and it is amplified by his use of odd electronics which add texture and distortions to his lines or simply populate the background. Halvorson's twangs ...
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