Department of Music

• Saturday, October 20, 2012
• The Bridge PAI
• 8:00pm
• $5 General Admission

Nate Wooley is one of a handful of trumpet players redefining the way instrument is approached. His solo improvisation concerts combine the jazz tradition with extreme extended technique, controlled amplifier feedback and silence. Wooley’s solo 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”.

Nate Wooley was born in 1974 in Clatskanie, Oregon, a town of 2,000 people in the timber country of the Pacific Northwestern corner of the U.S. He began playing trumpet professionally with his father, a big band saxophonist, at the age of 13. His time in Oregon, a place of relative quiet and slow time reference, instilled in Nate a musical aesthetic that has informed all of his music making for the past 20 years, but in no situation more than his solo trumpet performances. Nate moved to New York in 2001, and has since become one of the most in-demand trumpet players in the burgeoning Brooklyn jazz, improv, noise, and new music scenes. He has performed regularly with such icons as John Zorn, Anthony Braxton, Fred Frith, Evan Parker, and Yoshi Wada, as well as being a collaborator with some of the brightest lights of his generation like Chris Corsano, C. Spencer Yeh, Peter Evans, and Mary Halvorson.

Beyond playing trumpet, Nate is a champion for the dissemination of new and experimental music. He is currently one of the curators of collections and archives at the Database of Recorded American Music (DRAM – dramonline.org). His recent projects include the preservation, digitization and presentation of the historic concerts at Phill Niblock's Experimental Intermedia space, Mills College of contemporary Music, and the presentation of Ben Hall's epic southern gospel 45 collection. He has recorded numerous interviews with such musical iconoclasts as Eliane Radigue, Tom Johnson, Evan Parker, Anthony Coleman, Elliott Sharp and novelist Rick Moody for presentation in his groundbreaking series "The Listeners", available for streaming to the subscribers of DRAM. His essays have included work on the Edition Wandelweiser school of composition, Lee Hyla, Eliane Radigue, and Morton Feldman among others. This group of pieces is intended to find a middle ground of interest in new music between the grizzled veterans of abstract conceptual music in theory and practice and those that may be discovering it for the first time.

Nate Wooley will also be giving a colloquium on Friday, October 19, 2012, at 3:30pm in Old Cabell Hall.