Nate Wooley Releases 'Mutual Aid Music'

On Friday, April 16, 2021, trumpeter and composer Nate Wooley releases Mutual Aid Music, a double-CD of eight ensemble concertos, on Pleasure of the Text Records. Wooley's concertos are performed by an all-star group composed of saxophonist Ingrid Laubrock, violinist Joshua Modney, cellist Mariel Roberts, pianists Sylvie Courvoisier and Cory Smythe, percussionists Matt Moran and Russell Greenberg, and Wooley himself on trumpet.

Mutual aid points to the concept of community action and the human drive to provide succor to our fellow humans. Mutual aid is the primary ethic of an anarchistic utopia in which each knows what they have, is honest about what they need, and is prepared to give and receive accordingly. Every human want is met by a commensurate surplus and all are lifted equally above suffering. Wooley's Mutual Aid Music asks the musicians to take stock of their gifts and to ask themselves, in each moment, how their use of that gift will affect the community (ensemble) of which they are currently a member.

His compositional system asks musicians to question what they add to the ensemble as human beings first and musicians second. Rather than the traditional aim of faithfully reproducing a score through its mastery, the musicians are prompted to make decisions that purposely force the music away from facsimile and toward a spontaneity that may feel awkward and uncomfortable. They support each other in the search for something new and interesting; a music that is not only greater than the compositional whole, but has the potential to recast the way we think about the balance of virtuosity and improvisational spirit in our practice.

Wooley says, "Mutual Aid Music is as much a conceptual risk for me as the composer as it is a performative one for the musicians on this disc. The music here is a step - not an end - on a continuing search for a way of conceiving music that lives outside the dialectic bubble of improvisation/composition. In the best moments of improvisation, the complexity of individual musical spontaneity is beyond what I could ever conceive of reproducing on paper. Contemporary notated composition creates complexity on the page, but doesn't take into account the personal history of the player. So, the question is how to find a way that contains the best of both worlds by embracing both and neither at the same time? I felt that my best hope was the radical spontaneity and empathy of human beings rather than musical tradition, history, and theory."

He continues, "Mutual Aid Music provides material as a form of limitation that allows the mind to free itself of egoistic concerns, in turn, keeping the players from relying on muscle and musical memory as they enter and retreat from the slowly forming chaos of the group sound. By giving the ensemble members a choice of materials, the composition allows them to spend their energy on the most creative way to engage with those materials and, hopefully, with the ensemble at large."

Nate Wooley (b.1974) was born in Clatskanie, Oregon and began playing trumpet professionally with his father, a big band saxophonist, at the age of 13. He made his debut as soloist with the New York Philharmonic at the opening series of their 2019 season. Considered one of the leading lights of the American movement to redefine the physical boundaries of the horn, Wooley has been gathering international acclaim for his idiosyncratic trumpet language.

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 John Zorn, Anthony Braxton, Eliane Radigue, Annea Lockwood, Ken Vandermark, Evan Parker, and Yoshi Wada. He has premiered works for trumpet by Christian Wolff, Michael Pisaro, Annea Lockwood, Ash Fure, Wadada Leo Smith, Sarah Hennies and Eva-Maria Houben.

In recent years, he has built a reputation as a composer of music epic in scope and social in design. His series of solo works based on the International Phonetic Alphabet, The Complete Syllables Music, was compared to the literary work of Georges Perec and hailed as "revolutionary solo repertoire" by All About Jazz. At the other end of the spectrum, his decade-long Seven Storey Mountain cycle has encompassed almost 50 different performers, the most recent version consisting of a 32-person ensemble. This iteration, Seven Storey Mountain VI, "expresses communality, with all of its potential for the profound and the spiritual," according to Pitchfork. SSMVI appeared on many year-end lists, including as record of the year in El Intruso's International Critics List and critic Peter Margasak's personal list.

Another branch of Wooley's compositional work is his commitment to the concept of Mutual Aid Music, beginning with the quartet work Battle Pieces, commissioned by Anthony Braxton's Tri-Centric Foundation in 2014, and including a short-lived, but powerful compositional set entitled knknighgh in homage to poet Aram Saroyan. MAM has since matured into a full chamber ensemble work for double quartet and has been expanded through collaborative work with Annea Lockwood (Becoming Air, release on Black Truffle Records 2021), choreographers Kim Brandt, Jen Mesch, and Anna Sperber, and with commissions by TILT Brass, Loadbang Ensemble, and Dither Quartet.

Wooley received the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award in 2016. He was the recipient of the Instant Award for Improvised Music and the Spencer Glendon First Principles Prize in 2020.

He 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. Learn more at www.natewooley.com.

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