The Squid's Ear Magazine


Wooley, Nate (Wooley / Sawyer / Halvorson / Alcorn): Columbia Icefield (Northern Spy)

With two guitarists--Mary Halvorson and Susan Alcorn on pedal steel--and Ryan Sawyer on drums, New York trumpeter explores the Rocky Mountains Columbia Icefield, the largest icefield in the Canadian Rocky Mountains, through sophisticated compositions and superbly illustrative sound, an exceptional album of improvisation and intention from four modern masters.
 

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product information:

Personnel:



Nate Wooley-trumpet, electronics, composer

Ryan Sawyer-drums, voice

Mary Halvorson-electric guitar

Susan Alcorn-pedal steel guitar


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UPC: 689770738360

Label: Northern Spy
Catalog ID: CD-NS-112
Squidco Product Code: 27161

Format: CD
Condition: New
Released: 2019
Country: USA
Packaging: Digipack
Recorded at Oktaven Audio, in Mt Vernon, New York, on October 25th, 2017, by Ryan Streber.

Descriptions, Reviews, &c.

"The Columbia Icefield is an imposing behemoth, the largest icefield in the Rocky Mountains. It's alien, unapproachable, and yet, somehow, a striking metaphor for man's relationship to nature. On Nate Wooley's soaring, Columbia Icefield, the Pacific Northwest bred trumpeter tries to reckon with his relation to the Icefield and humanity in the face of the unapproachable. But this alien entity is laced with contradiction and imposes itself onto Wooley's music in a magnificent way.

"This record really came down to trying to build structures that have a feeling of being really large and slightly disturbing, but also, natural," Wooley explains, before adding, "it's earthbound, it comes from a natural place; it's not an attack on our senses. We understand it." And this became the chief task for Wooley and his superlative band-Mary Halvorson on guitar, Susan Alcorn on pedal steel, and Ryan Sawyer on drums-namely, how to express what is most natural and most foreign to us simultaneously?"-Northern Spy



"Nate Wooley is a fearless trumpeter whose past works include dauntless experiments with electronics and tape manipulations, encounters with jazz outlaws Joe Morris and Ivo Perelman and a creative reinvention from Wynton Marsalis' pre-curator days ((Dance to) The Early Music). Wooley's latest invention is inspired not by another artist or by sound manipulation, however; it comes from a place.

Columbia Icefield refers to the large area of connected glaciers found along the Canadian Rockies continental divide that separates British Columbia and Alberta. Not far from Wooley's Pacific Northwest childhood environs, the sheer size of this alien looking field is a apt metaphor for man's relation to its environs, a catalyst that informs Wooley's music set to three, long form compositions.

Wooley had assembled an electric band to carry out his mission, but perhaps not quite the electrification you might first think of. Sure, there's an electric guitarist, but that comes courtesy of Mary Halvorson, who is one of the least conventional players of that instrument. There's also a pedal steel guitar, provided by Susan Alcorn, who is also a maverick of her chosen instruments. And Wooley himself is playing his trumpet hooked up to an amplifier. Ryan Sawyer completes the quartet on drums.

"Lionel Trilling" begins with some pieces of the puzzle missing, but as the layers are piled on and pushes forward, a form emerges. What sounds at first to be some electronic murmuring and shuffling ruptures into Wooley's raging horn about six minutes in as he joins Halvorson and Alcorn into a truly alien note ascension that blooms into an aural soundscape beauty of the spacious, arid variety that matches the image of that Icefield. That's when the pure, unaltered sound of Wooley's trumpet first appears, and he leads the group into a new trek, one with more harmonic clarity. His melancholy interactions with Halvorson reach deep down in the soul, much as his former mentor Ron Miles has often done in conversing with Bill Frisell. Afterwards, Alcorn and Halvorson return to the opening ostinato and the process repeats.

Wooley's muted trumpet sets the solemn tone for "Seven In The Woods," accompanied sensitively by Alcorn, Halvorson and Sawyer; Alcorn's pedal steel really feels at home here, and that's even before she steps outside with a dissonant aside that redefines what the pedal steel can do. Afterwards, Halvorson turns up the fuzz and pierces the air with some stinging single line patterns.

Wooley's solitary horn commences "With Condolences" with little fanfare, slipping into improv then group improv, but staying on a key. Sawyer is the one who is most off-leash, though; his cajoling eventually pays off with another, brief liftoff of a noise tornado. Spoken words trade lines with Wooley's muted trumpet, continuing as the band takes the song into darker territory and ends with an elegiac coda of sorts.

Nate Wooley finds insight for his music from a glacial landscape and like the Columbia Icefield, it's far out and expansive."-S. Victor Aaron, Something Else Reviews



This album has been reviewed on our magazine:

The Squid
The Squid's Ear!

Get additional information at Something Else!

Artist Biographies

"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, Eliane Radigue, Ken Vandermark, 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 performed at the Walker Art Center as a featured solo artist.

Nate is the curator of the Database of Recorded American Music (www.dramonline.org) and the editor-in-chief of their online quarterly journal Sound American (www.soundamerican.org) 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."

-Nate Wooley Website (http://natewooley.com/about)
3/13/2024

Have a better biography or biography source? Please Contact Us so that we can update this biography.

"Ryan Sawyer is a drummer and percussionist from the USA. He has played with several artists and bands like, Tv On The Radio, At The Drive-In, Scarlet Johanson, Massive Attack, Boredoms (77 & 88 Boadrum), The Mekons, Thurston Moore, among others.He currently is playing with, Stars Like Fleas, Tall Firs, and Eye Contact."

-Discogs (https://www.discogs.com/artist/300910-Ryan-Sawyer)
3/13/2024

Have a better biography or biography source? Please Contact Us so that we can update this biography.

"One of improvised music's most in-demand guitarists, Mary Halvorson has been active in New York since 2002, following jazz studies at Wesleyan University and the New School. Critics have called her "a singular talent" (Lloyd Sachs, JazzTimes), "NYC's least-predictable improviser" (Howard Mandel, City Arts), "one of the most exciting and original guitarists in jazz-or otherwise" (Steve Dollar, Wall Street Journal), and "one of today's most formidable bandleaders" (Francis Davis, Village Voice). The Philadelphia City Paper's Shaun Brady adds, "Halvorson has been steadily reshaping the sound of jazz guitar in recent years with her elastic, sometimes-fluid, sometimes-shredding, wholly unique style."

After three years of study with visionary composer and saxophonist Anthony Braxton, Ms. Halvorson became an active member of several of his bands, including his trio, septet and 12+1tet. To date, she appears on six of Mr. Braxton's recordings. Ms. Halvorson has also performed alongside iconic guitarist Marc Ribot, in his bands Sun Ship and The Young Philadelphians, and with the bassist Trevor Dunn in his Trio-Convulsant. Over the past decade she has worked with such diverse bandleaders as Tim Berne, Taylor Ho Bynum, Tomas Fujiwara, Ingrid Laubrock, Myra Melford, Jason Moran, Joe Morris, Tom Rainey and Mike Reed.

As a bandleader and composer, one of Ms. Halvorson's primary outlets is her longstanding trio, featuring bassist John Hébert and drummer Ches Smith. Since their 2008 debut album, Dragon's Head, the band has been recognized as a rising star jazz band by Downbeat Magazine for five consecutive years. Ms. Halvorson's quintet, which adds trumpeter Jonathan Finlayson and alto saxophonist Jon Irabagon to the trio, has released two critically acclaimed albums on the Firehouse 12 label: Saturn Sings and Bending Bridges. Most recently she has added two additional band members-tenor saxophonist Ingrid Laubrock and trombonist Jacob Garchik-to form a septet, featured on her 2013 release Illusionary Sea. Ms. Halvorson also co-leads a longstanding chamber-jazz duo with violist Jessica Pavone, the avant-rock band People and the collective ensembles Thumbscrew and Secret Keeper."

-Mary Halvorson Website (http://www.maryhalvorson.com/bio/)
3/13/2024

Have a better biography or biography source? Please Contact Us so that we can update this biography.

"Susan Alcorn (born 1953) is an American composer, improvisor, and pedal steel guitarist. Having started out playing guitar at the age of twelve, she quickly immersed herself in folk music, blues, and the pop music of the 1960s. A chance encounter with blues musician Muddy Waters steered her towards playing slide guitar. By the time she was twenty-one, she had immersed herself in the pedal steel guitar, playing in country and western swing bands in Texas.

Soon, she began to combine the techniques of country-western pedal steel with her own extended techniques to form a personal style influenced by free jazz, avant-garde classical music, Indian ragas, Indigenous traditions, and various folk musics of the world. By the early 1990s her music began to show an influence of the holistic and feminist "deep listening" philosophies of Pauline Oliveros.

Though mostly a solo performer, Alcorn has collaborated with numerous artists including Pauline Oliveros, Eugene Chadbourne, Peter Kowald, Chris Cutler, Joe Giardullo, Caroline Kraabel, Earl Howard, Le Quan Ninh, Sean Meehan, Joe McPhee, LaDonna Smith, Mike Cooper, Walter Daniels, Ellen Fullman, Jandek, George Burt, Janel Leppin, Michael Formanek, Ellery Eskelin, Fred Frith, Maggie Nicols, Evan Parker, Johanna Varner, Zane Campbell and Mary Halvorson."

-Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_Alcorn)
3/13/2024

Have a better biography or biography source? Please Contact Us so that we can update this biography.


Track Listing:



1. Lionel Trilling 20:04

2. Seven In The Woods 19:20

3. With Condolences 13:50

Related Categories of Interest:


Improvised Music
Jazz
Free Improvisation
Electro-Acoustic
Electro-Acoustic Improv
NY Downtown & Metropolitan Jazz/Improv
Nate Wooley
Quartet Recordings
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