Trumpeter Nate Wooley Tackles the Deceptively Simple Challenges of a Michael Pisaro-Liu Solo Piece

It’s rare that an album of music for a solo wind instrument is of much interest to anyone beyond those who play it. There are notable exceptions. Wadada Leo Smith has put out several breathtakingly beautiful solo trumpet albums. Peter Evans’ solo trumpet work is more spectacularly breathtaking (and electronically enhanced). And Natsuki Tamura’s solo trumpet albums are a lot of fun for those who appreciate his renegade extended technique and irrepressible sense of humor.

Nate Wooley is probably not the first trumpeter you’d think of doing a solo record, especially considering his dense and bracing recent output with his Columbia Icefield project. But he has a solo album (for trumpet and sinewave), a recording of Michael Pisaro-Liu’s longform, minimalist composition Stem-Flower-Root. It hasn’t hit the web yet, although there’s a live version from 2017 up at Soundcloud. The calm and unhurried development of the work might be reflected in Wooley’s upcoming gig on July 5 at 6:30 PM at Downtown Music Gallery, where he’s playing with Cuban saxophonist Hery Paz and drummer Tom Rainey. Jazz bassist Henry Fraser and Americana violinist Cleek Schrey make an intriguing duo afterward at 7:30; it’s a pass-the-bucket situation.

Pisaro-Liu’s work requires Wooley to sustain a series of simple tones using subtly different timbral approaches, and a changing series of mutes. If a reveille or fanfare could exist on Pluto, this triptych would be both. But it’s not all warmly immersive reflection: there are a few moments where the harmonies edge into unexpectedly acerbic territory, and there’s a joke about two thirds of the way in which, intentional or not, is too good to spoil.

The album also comes with a chapbook designed by Jessica Slaven, where in similarly uncluttered prose, Pisaro-Liu raises many provocative philosophical questions. Some are eternal, some more specific to the piece. To what extent does the architecture of musical composition mirror the symmetry of nature? Can a composition, or for that matter, a whole genre, have a genuine personality? What improbable practical lessons can be gleaned from music as rigorously structured and focused, yet as comfortably atmospheric as this?

The composer and performer also share an interesting dialogue concerning both the nuts and bolts of playing it, along with some of the philosophical ramifications.

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An Especially Epic, Dynamically Conversational New Suite From Nate Wooley

Trumpeter Nate Wooley has put out a toweringly ambitious amount of largescale, highly improvisational work lately, notably his increasingly dark Seven Storey Mountain series. His latest album, Mutual Aid Music – streaming at Bandcamp – continues in that vein, but with a lyricism and often minimalist focus that may take recent listeners by surprise. Wooley asserts himself more melodically here than he’s done in recent years on album. The AACM influence on this epic double-disc set is vast, more so than in practically anything Wooley has written, both in terms of shifting ambience and room for group improvisation. Much as there’s new transparency in this music, it’s for people with long attention spans: every track clocks in at around ten minutes, sometimes more.

As usual, he has a killer supporting cast here: saxophonist Ingrid Laubrock, violinist Joshua Modney, cellist Mariel Roberts, pianists Sylvie Courvoisier and Cory Smythe, vibraphonist Matt Moran and percussionist Russell Greenberg,

Wooley’s bracingly haphazard microtones to open the first disc are a false alarm: his resonance, and sputters, and even the occasional squalling peak build a warm lyricism as the group linger and flit in and out of the background, vibraphone and piano piercing the veil. Rapt stillness descends at times, with Modney, Roberts and the piano throwing sparks above the haze, the bandleader exerting a final calm.

Spacious, Wadada Leo Smith-esque call-and-response grows more lively between Wooley and Laubrock as the second number gets underway. Moran is the eerie elephant in this room for awhile, the piano kicking off a galumphing, loopy drive that recedes and then returns with more of a wink and a Brian Jones-style circle of tinkling echoes. That’s got to be Courvoisier at the keys.

Moran and the piano introduce segment number three with a plaintive spaciousness, the horns dragging the rest of the group into a noir morass: this swamp is cold and forbidding and bodies are buried here. The twisted mobile fluttering in the breeze toward the end is the album’s most chilling interlude.

Massed flutters and coy faux backward masked riffs congeal uneasily as piano and sax resist in segment four, and there’s more wry humor in Courvoisier’s under-the-lid rustles and Modney’s sarcastic harmonics. Yet the activity on the high end, notably Moran and Modney, shifts to a a poltergeist atmosphere as the group wind it out.

The second disc opens with a big hit on the gong, Modney shredding, Roberts a whale at play, as a Terry Riley-ish study in hypnotically pulsing highs develops. From there, vast wave-motion surrealism contrasts with squirrelly flickers and thickets overhead.

Part two begins as a music box in a haunted attic, then gremlins – Roberts and the piano – take over, ceding to an echoey shimmer before a more agitated return. Part three shifts from solo neoromantic piano gloom to distant-nebula atmosphere splashed by Greenberg’s gongs, adrift between stars and their dust. The conclusion is about a quarter hour of increasingly dizzying polyrhythmic webs, Wooley a lone sentry as the mist moves in, Modney leaking astringency amid funhouse mirrors, and bustle receding to rapture as it winds out. Even all this is a only a capsule account of the strikingly dynamic, expertly conversational, raptly captivating interplay at work here.

Troubled, Intertwining Atmospherics in Trumpeter Nate Wooley’s Latest Seven Storey Mountain Installment

Trumpeter Nate Wooley’s ongoing Seven Storey Mountain project has a new sixth edition available and streaming at Bandcamp. It’s nothing like anything else in the series: haunting, often chaotic and even downright macabre in places. Although it was recorded prior to the lockdown, it uncannily seems to prefigure what the world has suffered this year.

The single 45-minute work begins with allusions to Renaissance polyphony fueled by the slightly off-key violins of C. Spencer Yeh and Samara Lubelski. Met by droning washes of harmonies from Susan Alcorn’s pedal steel, the atmosphere grows more ominous, Emily Manzo’s spare piano building funereal ambience.

Isabelle O’Connor’s similarly minimalist Rhodes piano enters the picture and suddenly a disorientingly syncopated clockwork interweave appears, with the flutters from drummers Chris Corsano, Ryan Sawyer and Ben Hall. From there it grows even loopier, circular riffs and nebulous atmospherics filtering through the mix in the vein of a contemporary, electronically-enhanced horror film score. It’s here that Wooley’s agitated, echoey lines first appear through the sonic thicket.

Sirening violins, broodingly steady Rhodes chords and a kaleidoscope of flickering noise ensue. It’s not clear where or even whether guitarists Ava Mendoza or Julien Desprez join in, or whether those scrapes which could be guitar strings are coming from the percussion section, until finally an icy, squalling patch played through an analog chorus pedal. It’s probably Mendoza but maybe not.

Drums and guitars and who knows what else reach a terrorized Brandon Seabrook-like stampede as the band hit fever pitch. The group bring it full circle with what seems to be a twisted parody of an organ prelude and a baroque chorale: the final mantra is “You can’t scare me.” This is by far the darkest, most psychedelic, and ultimately most assaultive segment in Wooley’s series yet, perhaps an inevitability considering the state of the world in 2020.

Uneasy Atmospheres and a Park Slope Gig by Trumpeter Nate Wooley

Trumpeter Nate Wooley has been on the front lines of the New York avant garde for almost twenty years. His latest album Columbia Icefield – streaming at Bandcamp – includes three tracks, two of them about twenty minutes long, a mix of the hypnoic and confrontational, the subdued and the dynamic. His next gig is an enticingly intimate one, at the Old Stone House in Park Slope tomorrow night, April 18 at 8 PM. Cover is $10

The album’s first number, Lionel Trilling begins with an overlapping series of contrastingly calm and agitated loops, spiced here and there with uneasy close harmonies. Ripsnorting textures intrude and then recede; finally a series of recognizable, spare, resonant, Wadada Leo Smith-like trumpet variations move to the center of the sonic picture. Mary Halvorson’s coldly clanging, loopy guitar, Susan Alcorn’s minutely textured pedal steel and Ryan Sawyer’s drum riffs linger and echo in the distance. From there it’s back to loops and then more rhythmic variations: just when the music seems about to drift off into the ether, something unexpected happens.

Seven in the Woods coalesces quickly into a moody dirge, desolate trumpet over lingering guitar jangle. Once the stringed instruments fade out, it grows more rhythmic and warmer, the second part with a lustrous, ambered brass interlude. Spacy bubbles from the guitar push it away; a momentary return once again is interrupted, this time by wailing, randomly shreddy fretwork as the drums tumble. The band bring it elegaically full circle at the end.

With Condolences is the album’s most spare, spacious, Wadada Leo Smith-inflected number, individual voices loosening and diverging, up to a moodily atmospheric series of tectonic shifts as the bandleader intones a nebulously regretful vocal interlude. The return to lustre and then a sense of mourning is unselfconsciously poignant: we’re in deep trouble when all the polar ice is gone. Wadada Leo Smith fans will love this record.