Struggling Up a Mountain, Led by a Trumpet Blast
Steve Smith in the New York Times
The concept of questing is fundamental to “The Seven Storey Mountain,” a sequence of related compositions by the trumpeter, improviser and composer Nate Wooley. He borrowed the title from the 1948 autobiography of Thomas Merton, who gave up a life of scholarship and leisure to pursue spiritual matters as a Trappist monk.
Mr. Wooley’s quest began in 2007, when he first presented a project titled “The Seven Storey Mountain”: a slow-mounting meditation for trio and taped sounds, subsequently documented on a live CD. Since that time, he has revisited and revised the piece with different bands, culminating in a new version that had its premiere at the Issue Project Room on Thursday evening.
In several interviews Mr. Wooley has described what he took from Merton and other spiritual pilgrims, including St. Augustine: not literal religious dogma, but the sense of rejecting a worldly life and normative values in pursuit of spiritual aspirations. Accordingly, all versions of Mr. Wooley’s “Seven Storey Mountain” involve a sloughing off of conventional technique in favor of esoteric sounds, and a sensation of slow, steady ascent through mysterious terrain toward a distant peak.
That each iteration has sounded more sure-footed than the last is a given, perhaps; Mr. Wooley has mapped the terrain in great detail, and several of his collaborators have made the trek repeatedly. Still, a good improviser never takes the same path twice, and Mr. Wooley’s band here was filled with exceptional players: the violinist C. Spencer Yeh, the analog-synthesizer player Ben Vida, the vibraphonists Chris Dingman and Matt Moran, and the drummers Chris Corsano and Ryan Sawyer.
For long, long moments, Mr. Wooley sat in prayerful repose. The drummers started a windy swoosh with brushes, then ceded to droning tones from Mr. Yeh and Mr. Vida that were at times indistinguishable from the recorded pulsations, buzzes and chimes emerging from loudspeakers around them. The vibraphonists added shimmering notated tones and chords in alternation and in rough concord. Finally Mr. Wooley joined in, huffing, squealing and singing through a trumpet with no mouthpiece, a microphone jammed into its bell.
The music mounted gradually for just over 45 minutes, the players working in loose tandem to reach each new peak, then subsiding to regroup. One tumultuous passage had the drummers fused in a white-water-rapids tumble; in another, taped drum sounds clattered and clanged while the players onstage sat still.
As in an earlier version of this latest “Seven Storey Mountain,” which Mr. Wooley presented in September, the climax came in a striking sequence of bold, sonorous chords on trumpets and trombones, played by members of Tilt Brass. You could practically see rays of sunlight breaking through banks of clouds as Mr. Wooley, trumpet pointed heavenward, reached the summit of his mountain once again.
A version of this review appeared in print on June 11, 2013, on page C7 of the New York edition with the headline: Struggling Up a Mountain, Led by a Trumpet Blast.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/11/arts/music/seven-storey-mountain-by-n…
