ISSUE Project Room is pleased to present Nate Wooley’s Seven Storey Mountain IV, for ecstatic instruments and tape. The most recent iteration of Wooley's seven part song cycle, this concert presents all sections of the work in their entirety for the first time, performed by an all-star and epic group of musicians including Chris Corsano(drums), Ryan Sawyer (drums), Ben Vida (electronics), C. Spencer Yeh (violin), Matt Moran (vibraphone), Chris Dingman (vibraphone), and TILT Brass sextet.
Seven Storey Mountain, first commissioned by Festival of New Trumpet Music five years ago, has developed over time into a form audiences first glimpsed at ISSUE’s Phillip Glass series in 2012. Some of the rough edges of previous versions (with David Grubbs/Paul Lytton and C. Spencer Yeh/Chris Corsano) have been smoothed out, with the same intent remaining: the fluent expression of a certain abandon found in religious practice, within the confines of a composed work for instrumentalists. Seven Storey I and II have been released to critical acclaim on Important Records, and Seven Storey III (with Corsano, Lytton, Grubbs, Yeh, and two vibraphones) will be released this year on Wooley's Pleasure of the Text records. In 2012, Seven Storey IV was performed in fragments at ISSUE Project Room, the FONT festival, and on a solo tour of Wooley's in the Netherlands.
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 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.
Wooley 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.
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”.
In the past three years, Wooley has been gathering international acclaim for his idiosyncratic trumpet language. Time Out New York has called him “an iconoclastic trumpeter”, and Downbeat’s Jazz Musician of the Year, Dave Douglas has said, “Nate Wooley is one of the most interesting and unusual trumpet players living today, and that is without hyperbole”. His work has been featured at the SWR JazzNow stage at Donaueschingen, the WRO Media Arts Biennial in Poland, Kongsberg, North Sea, Music Unlimited, and Copenhagen Jazz Festivals, and the New York New Darmstadt Festivals. In 2011 he was an artist in residence at Issue Project Room in Brooklyn, NY and Cafe Oto in London, England. In 2013 he will perform at the Walker Art Center as a featured solo artist.
Wooley is the curator of the Database of Recorded American Music and the editor-in-chief of their online quarterly journal Sound American both of which are dedicated to broadening the definition of American music through their online presence and the physical distribution of music through Sound American Records. He also runs Pleasure of the Text which releases music by composers of experimental music at the beginnings of their careers in rough and ready mediums.