A Silence Opens Nate Wooley

• 1 El Derecho 1 01:43
• 2 Howard Beach 12:00
• 3 El Derecho 2 00:46
• 4 Darken My Door 10:28
• 5 El Derecho 3 01:29
• 6 We Say Goodbye Twice/Wildwood Flower 10:33
• 7 El Derecho 4 00:50
• 8 You Taste 11:23
• 9 El Derecho 5 01:42
• Total Runtime 50:54

Info zu A Silence Opens

Death is a lack with weight. At the moment that you realize that someone you love is irrecoverably gone, a small tear in your life opens up. As days go by, the sliver of grief grows, becoming a rift, a gap, a gulley, a canyon. At the point that you feel lost in the immensity of space where that person used to be, the expansion stops; the hole—the vast and airy part of your life that used to be occupied by that person—becomes solid. Maybe it decreases in size, but more likely, your memories grow to occupy its space.

It’s at this point that what was once nothing but lack becomes a thing with density and gravity. The loss of that person holds your body and pulls as you learn to live without them. If you meet this pressure with sadness, it will pull you into the ground. But if you can somehow feel its substance as a gift, a chance to be rooted into a deeper entanglement with life, the heft that you feel becomes an embrace with the person you’ve lost and a reminder to be present with those you can still hold close. This is what we receive when someone we love dies.

As musicians, we can choose to address death directly or not. We can pay homage in so many ways, but simply reproducing the surface markers of what defined the person we’ve lost is not enough. We need to find something in our music that responds to the soul of our lost ones, not merely the practiced movement of fingers or the written strokes of a favorite tune. This is the difficulty we must face, and it is the payment for the gift we’ve received as the weight of our loss.

A Silence Opens was initially recorded as a response to the death of trumpeter and composer Ron Miles. Ron saved my life as a young man, and his friendship and his inspiration as a musician continue to guide me. When I succeed, I can see him smiling; when I fail or am cruel, I know he wants me to do better. When he died suddenly in 2019, I openly wept on the Q train and was a zombie for months. Unexpectedly, I had lost an older brother I didn’t realize I had and a friend I’d never told how much I loved. The small tear of loss grew quickly and took forever to heal into its heaviness. The four main tunes on this disc are based on his compositions or on licks and folk music I heard him play often during the years I was lucky enough to hear him live.

After we recorded, another small tear: Susan Alcorn. This loss was fresh and how we, as a band, dealt with it was to allow ourselves to fall into the weightless chasm her passing left. I found one of her favorite pieces of protest music and followed every frantic, delicate tendril of inspiration that my grief allowed. Ryan and Ava brought their personal loss into the studio and found a way to express their own history with Susan using their unique and powerful voices. We invited her friends to come and sing. It didn’t matter if it was good. We didn’t rehearse. We just felt the joy—in saying thank you, we love you, and good bye—that Susan would have taken in seeing friends and bandmates all lined up, eyes closed, following the lines of a melody she felt in her heart.

This is most likely the last Columbia Icefield record, and that is a loss, too. Over the last decade, the sound of this band has occupied my mind. Susan, Ryan, Ava, Mary Halvorson, and I have hammered out a music that I think is unique in its arc, its ambience, and its power. We’ve argued and huffed, hugged and laughed. We traveled to other continents and shot the shit in each other’s homes. This was a small family, and I think the music we made as a family was good and meaningful to me, and possibly to some other people. I mourn that loss as well.

The world of Columbia Icefield encompasses Ryan, Ava, and Mary, but it also includes Mat Maneri, Trevor Dunn, Ryan Streber, Randall Dunn, Ben Greenberg, and Owen Mulholland. Jen Mesch showed me the map of where to find this music, and David Breskin has been an important steward in helping me construct some beautiful buildings upon it. Danielle Oosterop helped us show others where to find it. I thank them all for their care and friendship in developing the life of Columbia Icefield, and I am thankful to all those that have listened to us over the years. May we always bear the weight of these losses as a gift of presence and memory. (Nate Wooley)

Nate Wooley, trumpet and amplifier, feet, whistling, vocals
Susan Alcorn, pedal steel guitar
Ava Mendoza, guitar, vocals
Ryan Sawyer, drums, shakers, vocals
Nate Wooley, choir
Ryan Sawyer, choir
Ava Mendoza, choir
Mary Halvorson, choir
Ingrid Laubrock, choir
Wendy Eisenberg, choir
Laura Ortman, choir
Patrick Holmes, choir

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”.

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”

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.

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. Wooley was a 2016 recipient of the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award and a 2017 recipient of funding from the Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation for his work with Seven Storey Mountain.

Nate Wooley made his premiere with the New York Philharmonic in the fall of 2018 as a soloist in Ashley Fure’s Filament, performed in the debut of the orchestra’s season.

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