Nate Wooley

»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 enormous importance to the Sinixt and other Indigenous peoples of the Upper Columbia. The falls disappeared from view following the construction of the Grand Coulee Dam in 1940, submerged beneath what is now Lake Roosevelt, yet beneath the still surfac…

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, question. This recording brings together four improvisers together in a multi-layered situation which combines multiple permutations of the untried and the familiar. The four had never all played together before but the quartet contains various his…

"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 feel lost in the immensity of space where that person used to be, the expansion stops; the hole—the vast and airy part of your life that used to be occupied by that person—becomes solid. Maybe it decreases in size, but more likely, your memories grow…

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 still unfamiliar. The music begins long before the sound does—inside a suspended brightness, a sky that hums with the possibility of transformation. The listener’s mind becomes a surface onto which impossible gestures imprint themselves: limbs blend…

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 his entire creative path, bearing the deep imprints of every colleague he has ever worked with, and embracing all the artistic directions that have shaped him. In Music for an Imaginary Ballet, Arkady evokes not only reminiscences of his friends and co…

*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 rare interview, Wendell Berry defended a concept of community as being a collection of all the living things that surround you. The farmer-poet was careful to clarify that this community wasn’t simply made up of those like you but must also include …

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 Rainey (drums). This recording captures the quintet in their purest element—live in the studio, free of plans or constraints, driven only by their joy of spontaneous creation. Renowned for his visionary approach, saxophonist Ivo Perelman assembles a…

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 moods, combining old-school jazzromanticism with the kind of nearly telepathic interaction thatonly a long-term creative relationship can inspire. Anyonewho’s enjoyed the first two volumes of this brilliant series willfind this latest dispatch to be a…

*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 inhalation of sonic spores. If categories can be applied to explore how concepts are played out in this music and throughout the album, perhaps think of displacement, confusion, time distortion and derangement. Otherwise the listener might choose to tr…

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 is an evolutionary step away from the spontaneity of the free jazz/noise aesthetic usually found in the music of Nate Wooley. Henry House expands on the ecstatic, durational work found in Wooley’s Seven Storey Mountain, a six-part composition that ha…

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 session, the ensemble consists of some of the greatest experts in their instrumental classes. Here, Nate Wooley meets vibraphonist Matt Moran, and all this is set against a backdrop of exquisite string players including Mat Maneri, Fred Lonberg Holm, …

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 piece here was written to be played by any number of players with any level of background, and they are presented here in solo versions and in small ensembles. Beyond the musical challenges posed through manic repetition, instrumental discomfort, the…

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 generations of improvisers, in trio with trumpet great Nate Wooley and clarinetist Jeremiah Cymerman, "World of Objects" is both a concert document and an intricate journey through the digital post-production of Jeremiah Cymerman. Over the course of thre…

"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 hopes of making no splash, who understands and embraces the imperfection of being, and in that way, stretches the definition of sainthood to fit." - Nate Wooley

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, up-tempo blues that absolutely swings. Vandermark and Wooley trade solos woven between unison lines. They rapidly bound ideas back and forth, with Vandermark on baritone sax and Wooley playing to the middle. About a minute in, they lock into a fantast…

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 Wooley (fourwordseamusic BMI). Paul Lytton photo by Gerald Schauder. Nate Wooley photo Frank Schneeman. Graphic Design: Małgorzata Lipińska. Executive Producer: Maciej Karłowski. It had been awhile since we'd made a real studio recording in which I cou…

** 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 described as stellar. Featuring some of the leading lights of both the New York and Chicago improvised music scenes, the four members of this quartet, all internationally acclaimed players in their own right, found a common language as a unit right from …

* 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 examples) * A Double-CD of of Eight Ensemble Concertos by Wooley Performed by Saxophonist Ingrid Laubrock, Violinist Joshua Modney, Cellist Mariel Roberts, Pianists Sylvie Courvoisier and Cory Smythe, Percussionists Matt Moran and Russell Greenberg, and N…

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 MAMAstudios, Vilnius, Lithuania. Sound Engineer - Arūnas Zujus. Mixed and mastered by Arūnas Zujus at MAMAstudios. Design by Oskaras Anosovas. Nate Wooley - trumpetLiudas Mockūnas - contrabass clarinet, soprano and tenor saxophonesBarry Guy - bassArkadijus Go…

* 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 compositions brilliantly captured in the studio, illuminating Shipp's solid mastery of the keys and Wooley's remarkable technique and creative drive.

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 path; here at Roulette in NYC with Nate Wooley, Sylvie Courvoisier (piano), Ingrid Laubrock (saxophone), and Matt Moran (vibraphone).

**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, Deeply Discounted II, is inspired by John Cage's Cheap Imitation which, in turn, was inspired by Erik Satie's, Socrate. Ken Vandermark's composition, Sequences of Snow, is dedicated to the visual artist and musician, Michael Snow, and was influenced by …

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 continues Nate Wooley’s idea of creating an ecstatic and communal music that is non-religious and non-genre based. The massive collective group includes international stars from the jazz, new music, electronic, and noise worlds–working together to rea…

 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, enclosed in sounds played with great care, as if each of them was so fragile that any inattention could destroy its structure

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 what the trumpet tone should be led him to the construction of a new compositional language, based on adjusting the physical parameters of how one makes sound. This new way of thinking was based on the shape and positioning of the oral cavity necessar…

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 dropped the needle onto the LP. Yes, this is a vinyl-only release, and yes, it is only an edition of 300 copies. Instead, I should have listened to both sides all the way through. But that would have required getting up to turn over the disc. So, I …

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 with them if possible. Their duo is one of those cases that reveal different and unexpected qualities from the participants, and points to a third mind of shorts at play, a meeting that seems to open up the two towards an underexplored territory. With…

"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 bubbling cauldron, channelling electricity to create groggy lo-fi textures. Chris Corsano is in a reflective, exploratory mood, dragging objects across amplified skins to create queasy high-pitched drones and dull metallic rings. Double bassist Hu…

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 work and features, alongside the composer on trumpet and amplifier, such leading lights of the experimental music scene as: Chris Corsano, C. Spencer Yeh, Ben Vida, Ryan Sawyer, David Grubbs, Paul Lytton, Matt Moran, Chris Dingman, and the TILT Brass S…

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 on their second encounter, there's an intriguing balance of freshness and reflection in the music here, one that matches their deep knowledge of improvised music's various pasts as well as their commitment to experiment and discovery.

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, NCAT is an unique quartet consisting of an improvising trio whose music has been mutated and structured in post-production by its fourth member. The bulk of the musical material on this LP was recording at Steim in Amsterdam, during a residency of …

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 Wooley, bassist Christian Weber, and percussionist Paul Lytton, amazing cross-Atlantic improvisation. " Squidco

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, feeling constricted by the sound based language he had been using up to that point in both his live solo playing and his earlier solo records. His goal was to make a true solo trumpet record, using only the trumpet as it was intended to be played with no e…

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 transcends religion, channeling the raw energy of free jazz and modern noise. Premiered at NYC’s Festival of New Trumpet Music, it blends improvisation, ambient textures, and bold experimentation—a testament to Wooley’s visionary artistry.

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' collaboration with GIO are just two recent examples that come to mind. At the forefront of this trend is the duo of Nate Wooley (trumpet & amplifier) and Paul Lytton (percussion & live electronics) bringing two of the most questioning minds in improvised music…

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 net form of the dodecahedron at the moment. What this guy's doing reminds me a wee bit of Florian Hecker, albeit with a completely different tool set. Here he spends half the LP exploring the pure sound capabilities of the trumpet in a series of craz…

Recorded live in Jersey City, NJ on 8/8/2004.Mixed and mastered at Amme Studios in NYC 9/1/2004