Nate Wooley – trumpet, amplifier

Nate Wooley’s playing has often been cited as being a part of an international revolution in improvised trumpet.  Along with Peter Evans and Greg Kelley, Wooley is considered one of the leading lights of the American movement to redefine the physical boundaries of the horn, as well as demolishing the way trumpet is perceived in a historical context still overshadowed by Louis Armstrong.  A combination of vocalization, extreme extended technique, noise and drone aesthetics, amplification and feedback, and compositional rigor has led one reviewer to call his solo recordings “exquisitely hostile”. In 2011, he was named Musician of the Year by NYC Jazz Record and Trumpet Player of the Year by an international critics poll in El Intruso Magazine.

Wooley regularly plays together with Paul Lytton (percussion and electronics). For the past five years they have been redefining the improvising duo, taking up where Lytton and Evan Parker left off in the middle 1970s.Wooley and Lytton have played with various guests, including Fred Frith, C. Spencer Yeah, Okkyung Lee, Evan Parker, John Russell, Phil Wachsmann, Joe Morris, Marilyn Crispell, Ikue Mori and Ken Vandermark. With the last two they recorded “The Nows’, which came out on clean feed in 2012.
What each successful duo has in common, is a chemistry, an attraction or spark between them. Such is the case with the musical duo of percussionist Paul Lytton and trumpeter Nate Wooley (All About Jazz).

Since 2008, the Nate Wooley Quintet has been involved in recasting the hard bop and free bop jazz traditions of the 1960s and 70s. Their first album, (Put Your) Hands Together, was voted one of the best records of the year by the New York City Jazz Record in 2011.The quintet includes some of the brightest lights in the New York jazz scene: Harris Eisenstadt (drums), Matt Moran (vibraphone) Eivind Opsvik (bass), Josh Sinton (bass clarinet and baritone saxophone) or Dan Peck(tuba).
Wooley found a sublime balance between a warm, melodic sound and the throwing-a-refrigerator-down-a-staircase sort of sounds for which he is known. All five musicians struck a similar posture, where freedom and allegiance to the tune created a beautiful tension throughout, creating moments of resolution like a held breath finally released. (Douglas Detrick)

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Nate Wooley

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