Skip to content

Nate Wooley

He began playing trumpet professionally with his father at age 12.  After college in Eugene, Oregon and Denver, Colorado he moved to Jersey City, NJ, where he currently resides.  Since 2001 he has become a much sought after performer, composer, and improvisor, working with Anthony Braxton, Evan Parker, John Zorn, Christian Marclay, C. Spencer Yeh, and David Grubbs among others.

natewooley.com
Memorial
»Memorial« grew out of Nate Wooley’s work alongside Annea Lockwood recording the Columbia River, and in particular from a visit to Kettle Falls in northern Washington, once one of the river’s great salmon fishing and meeting grounds and a place of en…
Parallels & Diagonals
Which is the more productive situation for improvisation: the shock of the first time encounter, unhindered by history or habit, or the long-term association and the evolution of more complex interactions? It's an unresolved, perhaps even undecidable…
A Silence Opens
"Death is a lack with weight. At the moment that you realize that someone you love is irrecoverably gone, a small tear in your life opens up. As days go by, the sliver of grief grows, becoming a rift, a gap, a gulley, a canyon. At the point that you …
Dreaming With The Lights On
Tip! You’re approaching the region where gravity feels tampered with; “Dreaming With The Lights On” is to drift into a zone where bodies and objects appear to have slipped into a dream’s editing room and reassembled themselves according to priorities…
Music For An Imaginary Ballet
Music for an Imaginary Ballet is both a creative landmark and a musical diary of Arkady Gotesman long and rich career spanning over three decades. In 2023, Arkady presented his solo project of the same title. This chamber solo performance reflects hi…
A Fine Rain Anoints The Canal Machinery
*50 copies limited edition* "Enough sun finally came up on the Wyoming prairie that I could relax my fears. I shut off the studio lights and watched a dune of snow reveal itself under the squat, black graphs of denuded trees. I drank old coffee. In a…
A Modicum of Blues
Polish label Fundacja Słuchaj is thrilled to announce the release of "A Modicum Of Blues," an electrifying new album by five powerhouse improvisers: Ivo Perelman (tenor sax), Nate Wooley (trumpet), Matt Moran (vibraphone), Mark Helias (bass), and Tom…
Polarity 3
The third volume of duos between indefatigable tenorsaxophonist Ivo Perelman and adventurous trumpeter NateWooley is their most intimate encounter to date. Beginningwith mournful, almost undersea drones, it moves through avariety of subtly shifting m…
The Zebra Paradox
*2025 stock* Setting the stage for The Zebra Paradox requires building anticipation and intrigue on the inside of the listener before they even hear the first notes. To accomplish this an imagined transference of information must bloom like a deep in…
Henry House
CD housed in 6 panel digisleeve. 12 pages booklet and Obi. Henry House is a recurring dream song. Combining closely tuned instruments and sinetones, tape-music editing techniques, field recordings, and voice, this eighty-minute, five-part song cycle …
Seven Skies Orchestra
2024 stock. The great maestro Ivo Perelman rarely gives samples of his playing in the setting of larger ensembles. This is perhaps the first time we have had the opportunity to listen to him in the setting of a sextet formation. Especially for this s…
Four Experiments
Huge Tip! *2024 stock* Four Experiments stemmed from a pandemic fascination with an early book of poetry by Stephen Spender and a desire to explore new ways of viewing my relationship to instrumental, compositional, and improvisatory technique. Each …
World Of Objects
Recorded live in concert in the fall of 2013, "World of Objects" is an intense and confounding document of 21st century improvised music. Featuring Evan Parker, a singular musician whose approach to music and the saxophone has influenced several gene…
Ancient Songs Of Burlap Heroes
"This album is dedicated to those who recognize living as a heroic act: the occupiers of sunup barstools; the cubicle-planted; the ghosts of Greyhounds; the reasonably sketchy. A burlap hero is one who marches—consciously or not—back to the sea in ho…
All Directions Home
Recorded last summer at The Sugar Maple, in Milwaukee, the latest release from Ken Vandermark and Nate Wooley, All Directions Home, wastes exactly no time getting going. The opener, Vandermark’s “Another Lecture (For Walter Benjamin),” is a hearty, u…
Known / Unknown
Fundacja Słuchaj! ‎presents Known / Unknown by Paul Lytton and Nate Wooley.  Recorded January 2018 in Dusseldorf, Germany. Engineered and Mixed/Mastered by Bojan Vuletic. Special Thanks to Bojan and Maciej. All Music by Paul Lytton (GEMA) and Nate Wo…
From Wolves to Whales
** In Process of Stocking ** Having crossed paths around the world many times over the years, Nate Wooley and Dave Rempis finally realized their long-time intention of forming a band together in the winter of 2014, with a lineup that can only be desc…
Mutual Aid Music
* Limited edition double CD + 12-Page Booklet. Six panel gatefold CD package beautifully designed by Lasse Marhaug and featuring an exclusive essay on the social and artistic philosophy behind Mutual Aid Music by the composer (including notated examp…
NOX
NoBusiness presents NOX, a new set of recordings by Nate Wooley / Liudas Mockūnas / Barry Guy / Arkadijus Gotesmanas recorded 29th October, 2019 during Improdimensija (Improdimension) concert series dedicated to improvised music, located at MAMAstudi…
What If?
* 2020 Stock * An authoritative meeting between two of New York City's strongest players - Matthew Shipp on piano and Nate Wooley on trumpet - distilled to their essence after work with saxophonist Ivo Pereleman, here performing a set of 12 Shipp com…
Battle Pieces
Battle Pieces uses trumpeter Nate Wooley's "social music" system, where each piece is constructed for a soloist who improvises with no score while the remaining player choose at will from over 75 compositions over which the soloist must find their pa…
Deeply Discounted II / Sequences of Snow
**500 copies** This latest album is an exciting new statement from the duo, featuring long-form compositions for the first time, written specifically for the LP format and developed while touring in North America during 2017. Nate Wooley's piece, Dee…
Seven Storey Mountain V
2016 Release. Seven Storey Mountain V is the fifth of seven evening length works that began with a Festival of New Trumpet commission in 2007. Recorded live at Abrons Art Center in New York City as part of the 2015 Tectonics NY festival, SSMV cont…
Of Echoing Bronze
 Nate Wooley and Torben Snekkestad recorded live at "KoncertKirken – Blågårds Plads" in Copenhagen, July 5, 2015. The result is an astonishingly focused music, which transfers listeners into a completely different world and different order of things…
The Complete Syllables Music
The Complete Syllables Music is the first collected edition of trumpet experimentalist Nate Wooley’s groundbreaking solo compositions. His attempt to sidestep a positive/negative value based musical aesthetic and to expand his own preconceptions of w…
Purple Patio
All music by Nate Wooley, Hugo Antunes, Jorge Queijo, Mário Costa, Chris Corsano. Recorded on 12th May 2012 at Sá Da Bandeira Studio, Portugal. Mixed by Manuel Reis.  If I had to do it all over again, I would not have judged Purple Patio as soon as I…
Third
We’ve been great fans of ‘The Duchess of Oysterville’, the first outing from the duo of Chris Forsyth & Nate Wooley on cd some years ago on Creative Sources (with a follow-up later on Chocolate Monk), and had been looking for an opportunity to work w…
Malus
"An often inspired study in post-noise atmospherics, Malus brings together three pioneering improvisers in their late thirties. Nate Wooley deploys vocalisation and extreme extended technique to turn his trumpet into a hissing steam engine and a b…
Seven Storey Mountain III And IV
Restocked! A double disc set featuring two live performances from Brooklyn's Issue Project Room in 2010 and 2012. This continues the series of recordings released over the past five years on Important Records of Wooley's long form electro-acoustic wo…
About Trumpet and Saxophone
About Trumpet and Saxophone brings together New York based trumpeter Nate Wooley and London based saxophonist Seymour Wright for a series of intensely material duo improvisations that inhabit the tricky overlap between these two instruments. Recorded…
Ncat
Nate Wooley, trumpet, amplifier. C. Spencer Yeh, violin, voice. Audrey Chen, cello, voice, electronics. Todd Carter, piano, electronics, edit. Blurring the lines between electronic and acoustic music, as well as composition versus improvisation, N…
Six Feet Under
Nate Wooley, trumpet. Christian Weber, bass. Paul Lytton, percussion. Recorded November 30, 2009 at Radio Studio Zürich, Switzerland by Martin Pearson "Five group compositions recorded in 2009 at Switzerland's Radio Studio Zurich by trumpeter Nate…
The Almond
The Almond started as a short study for trumpet for the British website Compost and Height. Nate Wooley, a rising young composer known mostly for his radical recontextualization of the trumpet in improvisation and jazz music, was, at the time, feelin…
The Seven Storey Mountain
a groundbreaking musical project by Nate Wooley, unites legends like Paul Lytton (Evan Parker’s longtime collaborator) and David Grubbs (Gastr Del Sol, Bastro) in an ecstatic sonic journey. Inspired by Thomas Merton’s spiritual exploration, the piece…
Sold Out
Creak above 33
An interesting development in recent times has been the transAtlantic and trans-generational connections being made in the improvisation community. The Emanem recording by Steve Beresford with Okkyung Lee and Peter Evans, and George Lewis' collaborat…
Trumpet/Amplifier
RESTOCKED: Last copies, reduced price...Everyone's well into big circles at the moment. Check the new Autechre album, Sunn's Monoliths and Dimensions, that No Age 12" and now this. Circles are pretty cool I guess, but personally I'm more diggin' the …
Wrong Shape To Be A Storyteller
Recorded live in Jersey City, NJ on 8/8/2004.Mixed and mastered at Amme Studios in NYC 9/1/2004