Review
NATE WOOLEY Wrong Shape to be a Story Teller
creative sources recordings 038
This is a solo trumpet disc from local trumpet
ace Nate Wooley, one of the few cats who is working hard at
redefining the vocabulary and sound of the trumpet. Although
saxes often get most of the ink in the history of jazz (Bird,
Trane, Ornette, Dolphy, Ayler, etc.), it seems to be the trumpet
players that really link the history of change (Louie Armstrong
to Miles Davis to Don Cherry, Lester Bowie, etc). Over the
past decade another bunch of trumpeters have signaled new sounds
for that old horn. Europeans like Axel Dorner and Franz Hautzinger,
as well as their American counterparts: Greg Kelley and Nate
Wooley, each have done their share to expand their unique sound(s).
When I first put this on, I thought someone was boiling water
for tea, that same sort of whistle. This 51-minute epic solo
effort show a variety of different sounds, textures and approaches
to the trumpet. Notes are stretched out and bent into different
shapes and often it is difficult to tell what instrument Nate
is actually playing. You can tell he is concentrating as he
works with small fragments of note and bending them in strange
way. A most impressive effort.
- Bruce Gallanter, Downtown Music Gallery, June 10, 2005
Review
NATE WOOLEY Wrong Shape to be a Story Teller
creative sources
recordings 038
If you really want to test yourselves, putting
your money where your mouth is during those discussions with
your friends about "lowercase", "reductionism" and
other by now trendy definitions, look no further than this
exquisitely hostile work, where Nate Wooley tackles silence
and calmness through a series of postcards from the hell of
deviant trumpet. Wrecking all institutional conventions, Wooley
extracts pneumatic excursions and electrostatic aromas from
the nails of a buggy muteness, at times provoking the listener
with machine-like holds/ostinatos and eruptions of charged
clumsiness, then inviting the surrounding environment to take
his place while he develops the next ideas as soon as they
come to mind. Clucks and breath become a challenge to the sophistication
of what is "acceptable" in improvisation and certainly
Wooley is not the kind of artist likely to look back after
his corrosive statements; in this album, even the absence of
events becomes dangerous.
- Massimo Ricci, Touching Extremes, August 2005
Review
BLUE COLLAR Lovely Hazel
public eyesore pecd 81
This is the companion album
to
last year's Rossbin release by this NYC trio, material from the
same
2003 recording sessions with the same vivid and powerful recording
quality. Like that fresh jewel of multi-directional free improv,
there's a lot of variety from piece to piece on Lovely Hazel,
and
there's no difference in overall character I can cite. This disc
really captures Nakatani's current sound as well as any other;
on the
opening track "48/1" (check out the elegant numerical
titles!) you
wouldn't even really know there was a percussionist with his
incredible bowed and scraped textures blending with the trumpet
and
trombone noise sculpture--for that matter, it's not even obvious
there's a trumpet and trombone!
Dense, shifting textures of complex
acoustic timbres with mysterious dynamic shifts--I'm in heaven!
But
Nakatani usually favors isolated, dramatic percussive strikes,
like
the resonant booms on "47", which is almost like slow
Kodo drumming
without the predictable licks. Swell and Wooley's confident,
loud,
sustained brass tones cannot be punctuated by this punctuation;
they
defy time and occasionally collapse into unexpected and inexplicable
chunks of sound complexity. In "74" Nakatani shows
his knack for
making sudden, powerful composite gestures, pounding his bass
drum at
the same time he creates a fast buzzing/scraping sound with a
metal
rod, and in "110" he shows he can tear it up with some
Lytton-grade
high-velocity skitters, a bit of an anomaly for a generally slow-paced
disc. On "48/2" Nakatani's trademark massive bowed
percussion blends
with sustained brass language extensions to create a shifting,
thick
meta-drone with a bracing, penetrating sharpness and exquisite
slowness. If Dumitrescu were to hear this album, I bet he'd have
these
guys on the first available flight to Romania!
By and large,
the
defining sound of Blue Collar is the unconventional and unbridled
brass experimentalism of Wooley and Swell, who freely range from
microscopically detailed and quiet Doerner-style
acoustics-as-electronics passages to harsh blustering at the
outer
fringes of brass timbres. The music cuts across recent trends
in
improvised music, often favoring a restricted, economical, sparse,
slow style, but it's usually somewhat loud, explosive, and faintly
"
expressive" instead of being quiet and austere. Unique and
powerful
music by accomplished musicians at the nexus of current developments
in improvised music. This is that hot mix of FMP-style free improv
and
Tibetan ritual orchestra jams you've been waiting for all these
years.
It's here. Dig it.
- Michael Anton Parker
Review
BLUE COLLAR ___ is an apparition
rossbin
records
016
I've been deeply impressed by trumpeter Nate Wooley's playing in
very diverse situations over the past few years, and I'm ecstatic
to finally have an official recorded document that captures him
so well. Wooley has found his own way in a post-Kelley/Doerner/Hautzinger
world, with an openness to different musical situations that
puts him in a similar category as masters like Daniel Carter and Jack
Wright, two of his major inspirations and favorite playing partners,
musicians that make the music happen in almost any situation.
He is known for his visibly spiritual immersion in the improvisational
moment, freely switching back and forth between trumpet and restrained,
trumpet-like vocals. Although he has a subdued, thoughtful lyrical
side that's been shaped by his studies with Ron Miles and his
deep admiration of Maneri music, with this trio he focuses on his more
unconventional trumpet explorations, creating amazing new shapes
and textures in tandem with the awe-inspiring virtuosity of trombonist
Steve Swell, who is one of the true heroes of current jazz, part
of that small circle of musicians who are really sustaining jazz
as a living tradition. This is not a typical jazz-related outing
for Swell though, but rather a rare showcase for him as a radical
improvisor who can find meaning in exploratory concepts of sound
and motion without relying on pulse or melody. Percussionist
Tatsuya Nakatani brings his abstract ritualism to the trio, pushing things
even further into unknown territory with his bells, gongs, bowed
cymbals, rumbles and scrapes.
Track 7 finds them dealing with sustained rhythmic flurries that
recall the wild double-trumpet and percussion trio album by Herb
Robertson, Paul Smoker, and
Jay Rosen on CIMP, but besides that passage this disc is much more unconventional
rhythmically, with a total deconstruction of the usual roles of the instruments.
Wooley and Swell avoid typical "brassy" passages and focus more on
percussive sounds and air-blast textures, such as the mind-blowing passage in
track 6 that sounds like a storm on another planet. Even though they often give
the feeling of "acoustic instruments making electronic music", the
music is more biological than mechanical--sound shapes moving in an unidentifiable
biological space, waddling over leaves, tripping over a rock, plopping into a
puddle. It's the sounds of animals that don't quite exist, with motions and moods
that defy human understanding. The three instruments softly bump into each other,
jerk in opposite directions for a second, circle around each other. The togetherness
is stunning, but without any cliches of groove or call-and-response; it's an
abstract togetherness of moving around in the same small space. Even though it's
completely improvised music, they have a genuine group sound from regular gigging
around NY over the past few years, and it's appropriate that they have a band
name ("Blue Collar") instead of just "Wooley/Swell/Nakatani".
This disc feels like a fresh new point in the space of musical possibilities,
within visiting distance of the early British free improv traditions, current
traditions of abstract gesturalism, 90s free jazz, and the primal/sublime dialectic
of the Jack Wright school. It's packed to the brim with magic and detail, another
masterpiece from the discerning and impeccable Italian label Rossbin.
- Michael Anton Parker
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