Morris, Joe / Nate Wooley

Tooth and Nail

Label: Clean Feed Country: Portugal

"After previous partnerships with Anthony Braxton and Barre Phillips in the Clean Feed catalogue, here we find the guitarist in another duet, this time with Nate Wooley. We could expect such a natural gathering between the two innovators of their respective instruments, both devoted to the "expansion of technique and aesthetics", as Joe Morris puts it on his liner notes - one redefining the use of the electric guitar in jazz, going back to a fingerpicking approach to open a new path, and the other taking the trumpet beyond its lexical and even physical limits, exploring the most basic of all performative factors, like breath, use of spit, and tongue positioning. This kind of association indicates us, from the start, that we're going to testify something very special, a journey of puzzling discoveries, mutual challenges, brilliant spontaneous solutions, dynamic interchange, and close interaction. If the free-form, avant jazz tendencies had only one guitar hero in its golden years, Sonny Sharrock, Morris is the most representative player of the instrument in these present days, renewing the language and the procedures but staying faithful to what Braxton calls the "African-American continuum". Like Axel Dorner in Europe, Wooley can be one of the most radical and revolutionary of the new generation of trumpeters, but his roots are in the jazz tradition coming from Louis Armstrong. Tooth and Nail is not to be missed - this is, indeed, a glimpse of the future."-Clean Feed