Nate Wooley and Mutual Aid Music to Release Box Set, FOUR EXPERIMENTS

On Friday, September 29, 2023, prolific jazz trumpeter and composer Nate Wooley will release a four-disc box set, Four Experiments. Wooley has crafted Four Experiments as a collection of study pieces where the goal is not step-by-step instruction through known methods, but a guide to charting the uncharted. With an emphasis on expanding knowledge and loosening preconceived attitudes, Wooley's "experiments" offer insights on composition and improvisation while infusing a uniquely human element: exploring the idea of authorship in contemporary music, mining the complexity of human interaction, and daring to find value in experiencing failure.

The release will be marked by a single - "Experiment Three Take Two," performed by Mariel Roberts and Joshua Modney - out September 15 and a concert at Brooklyn's Roulette Intermedium on Tuesday, September 26, 2023 at 8:00PM.For this new release, Wooley has brought together an expanded version of the band featured on his 2021 Mutual Aid Music album, a collection of ensemble concertos dedicated to the ideal of aiding and receiving aid from fellow humans - expressed through the prism of the musical gifts that musicians share with listeners and one another. In words foreshadowing this later release, The Wire praised Mutual Aid for its improvisational spirit, guided by Wooley using rules "just simple enough to enable these players to create something truly beautiful. Consider this experiment a success." On Four Experiments, Wooley (trumpet, voice) is joined by Weston Olencki (trombone), John McCowen (recorder), Ryan Packard (percussion), Lester St. Louis (cello), Luke Stewart (double bass, amplifier), Cory Smythe (piano), Russell Greenberg (percussion), gabby fluke-mogul (violin), Mariel Roberts (cello, voice), Josh Modney (violin, voice), Seymour Wright (alto saxophone), Laura Cocks (flute), Madison Greenstone (clarinet) and Eric Wubbels (piano, voice, autoharp).

In his notes on the box set, Wooley explains that the title and ethos were inspired by Nine Experiments, an early collection by the 20th century English poet Stephen Spender. Intrigued by the rough, unfinished quality of the poems, and the space that left for further contemplation, Wooley brought a similar approach to Four Experiments. In his compositions, he also chose to stray, at times, from standard musical notation, sometimes using text or visual prompts as a guide to the performer. "The scores were conceived to give just enough information to the musicians - either as soloists or as an ensemble - to navigate the piece while also opening the door to musicians for whom music notation may be unnecessary," Wooley writes.

Elsewhere, Wooley describes how the concept of Four Experiments, and the approach inspired by Spender, converge with the ideals established by Mutual Aid Music. "I started seeing the structure of Nine Experiments as a generative architecture for the group's compositions, and as a model for its philosophy. ... These recordings represent the first blunderings into uncharted territory. As a group, we-an expanded version of the ever-evolving Mutual Aid Music Ensemble-are moving recklessly, but with a collective intuition of where we are headed. Each 'Experiment' is a first step. And with each, we gain new insights into the sound of our destination."

In Experiment One: "Bray Trumpets, Blow forever in my head!," McCowen, Olencki and Wooley himself explore how innovation can be found in "failure." Challenged to repeat a single musical cell identically, again and again, the artists are further instructed that when (inevitably) they make an error, they should then repeat that error in all following iterations, yielding a gradually and "accidentally" evolving composition. For McCowen's solo version, recorded in a warehouse space in Iceland, Wooley chooses not to remove the ambient noises caught on the recording-the squeaking of the musician's boots, or his audible sighs of frustration. Wooley and Olencki combine for a separate duo version on the album.

Experiment Two: "The voices of the poor, like birds That thud against a sullen pain," prompts musicians to explore the relationships they have with their instruments from a new angle, discarding traditional consensus on the instrument's ideal sound. For this experiment, the musician is asked to locate the instrument's vibratory surfaces and investigate the effects of different resonating objects against those surfaces. Pressing the fingers against these objects, the musician is prompted to take in the resulting tonal and tactile results. This experience becomes the "piece." Two versions of the experiment are performed on the album: an ensemble version by fluke-mogul, Greenberg, Smythe, St. Louis and Stewart; and a solo version by Packard - using concert bass drum, sine tones played through a speaker cone, and a piece of rope.

Experiment Three: "Touched lips and quiver, as though these worn things..." challenges the idealized notion of the "singing" tone that instrumentalists are sometimes taught to pursue by invoking the actual frailties and limitations of the typical human voice. For this experiment - designed mainly for musicians who are not trained vocalists - a constant droning tone is played while the musician is challenged to sing over it, vocalizing a score based on Just Intonation ratios. Like Experiment One, this exercise is designed in part to find the possibilities in imperfection as the musician pursues what, for most, is an unreasonably challenging task. On the album, it is performed as a solo by Wooley, and in duo versions by Modley and Roberts.

Experiment Four: "I am dizzy looking at their face;" begins with a "moth-like" diagram comprising a "head" and four "wingtips." The musician is first asked to choose a small, familiar fragment of musical material to work with (melodic, rhythmic, etc.), which is represented by the "head." The four "wingtips" represent harmonic motion
(adding, changing, or subtracting pitches played simultaneously or as a melody), physicality (a prompt to move off the instrument and toward the body), extension (blurring the material using traditional and non-traditional instrumental techniques), and articulation (an exploration of how sounds begin). The player is then tasked with repeating the original fragment with small, incremental variations based on the four "wingtip" parameters. This process is used as a means to discover how the primary material evolves - indisputably, but at an almost imperceptible pace - into something entirely different. The experiment is performed on the album as a solo by Wright, and as a trio by Cocks, Greenstone and Wubbels.

Concert Information
Nate Wooley's Mutual Aid Music: Four Experiments Record Release Show
Tuesday, September 26, 2023 at 8:00PM
Roulette Intermedium | Brooklyn, NY
Tickets: $25 advance; $30 doors; $20 Student/Senior (w/ ID, Senior 65+)
Link: https://roulette.org/event/mutual-aid-music-four-experiments-record-release/

Performers:
Nate Wooley, trumpet
Russell Greenberg, percussion
Matt Moran, vibraphone
Madison Greenstone, clarinets
gabby fluke-mogul, violin
Joshua Modney, violin
Mariel Roberts, cello
Luke Stewart, bass

Four Experiments Tracklist
Experiment One: "Bray Trumpets, Blow forever in my head!"
1. Experiment One (Solo) [27:01]
2. Experiment One (Duo) [31:51]

Experiment Two: "The voices of the poor, like birds That thud against a sullen pain,"
3. Experiment Two (Solo) [18:21]
4. Experiment Two (Ensemble) [20:35]

Experiment Three: "Touched lips and quiver, as though these worn things..."
5. Experiment Three (Solo) [22:54]
6. Experiment Three (Duo I) [6:46]
7. Experiment Three (Duo II) [8:39]
8. Experiment Three (Duo III) [8:00]

Experiment Four: "I am dizzy looking at their faces;"
9. Experiment Four (Solo) [18:21]
10. Experiment Four (Trio) [20:35]

Total Time: 3:03:03

Album Credits
Experiment One Solo Recorded in Reykjavik, Iceland April 24, 2022
Experiment Two Solo Recorded in Stockholm, Sweden May 11, 2022
Experiment Three Solo Recorded in Brooklyn, New York April 24, 2022
Experiment Four Solo Recorded in London, England February 22, 2022
All ensemble versions of the Experiments were recorded between June 28-October 4, 2022 at Oktaven
Studios in Mount Vernon, New York by Ryan Streber
Mixing and Mastering by Ryan Streber
Graphic Design by Lasse Marhaug
All compositions by Nate Wooley 2022 fourwordseamusic
Pleasure of the Text Records PotTR1310

About Nate Wooley

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 Award in 2020. He is a 2022 NYFA/NYSCA Fellow in Music and Sound. He has also been named the 2024 Jean Macduff Vaux composer-in-residence at Mills College.

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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