interviews

Interview with Nate Wooley (Apr — Jul 2009)

By clifford ⋅ July 29, 2009 ⋅ ⋅ commentellen

I first heard trumpeter Nate Wooley a few years ago on Transit’s eponymous debut (Clean Feed, 2005). A pianoless quartet outside the range of what one usually expects from such instrumentation, Wooley’s language is clearly crucial in setting Transit apart from its peers. Alongside Peter Evans, Taylor Ho Bynum and Rob Mazurek, Wooley is one of several post-Bill Dixon trumpeters turning brass improvisation on its head. But that’s only part of the story here. Born in Oregon in 1974 and schooled in postbop, Wooley’s search has been as much about individual expression and finding out what jazz and music mean to him, as it is about carving an alternative path for the instrument. Wooley took time out from a busy music (and life) schedule throughout April, May, and July 2009 to converse over email. This interview is the result of that conversation. ~CA

TRANSIT-IONS

Could you talk specifically about some of your current projects – especially the trio with Roebke and Lonberg-Holm, Crackleknob (with Reuben Radding and Mary Halvorson), and Transit?

As for Hammer (the group with Jason and Fred), I went over the group history in more detail in Dan’s interview for Paris Transatlantic, so in the interest of not repeating too much, I’ll just say that I have only very rarely felt that comfortable playing with two other musicians. Playing in a trio is very tricky for me, honestly. In a duo, I can visualize each part and have a more realistic view of how each part is moving, what is in the foreground, what in the background, how each person is functioning, if it is an equal but unrelated dialogue, or one person is supporting the other, or if there is a specific counterpoint. With a quartet, there is either the traditional view of soloist or melody with support, or you can look at it as multiple ever changing duos. With a trio, I often get the feeling that there is a wild card in there and for me, most of the time, that takes me out of my head a little and I feel like what I’m playing isn’t as clear or rigorous as I would like it to be. In the trio with Fred and Jason, I find that their playing is so well thought out and free of waste motion, not to mention the general pace is much more relaxed, slow, and full of breath, that I am able to sit and place my phrases where I want.

I often see cycles in things in daily life. It’s a bit of an OCD thing for me - how do traffic lights cycle, traffic patterns, train schedules, stuff like that. I think about it a lot. The point of bringing that up is that when a group is really working for me I can feel the cycles of the other players, or at least that is how it seems to me. This happens in both this trio and Crackleknob, but in very different ways. With Fred and Jason, I can get an idea of their cycles or phrasing or breathing or however you want to refer to it, and I know that whatever cycle I introduce into the overall pattern of the music is not going to drastically change where they are and what they are doing. Maybe Fred and Jason see it differently, but I think the beauty of that group, and one of the reasons that people seem so split in their opinions of it is that very quality. It is not music where player A does pattern 45 and players B and C act accordingly based upon a historical or documented set of rules. It is more like A makes a sound and B and C are very aware of it but they are making a conscious decision of how and if they are going to react. That is really engaging for me and really very liberating. I never feel like I’m playing trumpet in that group, more that I’m singing or speaking and that is a place I’m really interested in.

From the listening standpoint, I can see how that is frustrating for some people. You have to put a little work in to make the connections or to come to grips with the intentional non-connections. Ultimately for me, as a listener, that is really rewarding and one of the things that draws me to the music you mentioned in your review. I could listen to SEM or Derek Bailey or Evan Parker all day long, because with that music there is always something to invest yourself in.

That may seem like a totally cold way to view things, sort of a “I’m reading Derrida because it is difficult” approach, but what happens in the best of situations (and I think it is happening in this trio) is that you have that level of abstraction on a group level, but on an individual level there is such an incredible amount of humanity and personality and warmth in each person’s playing that you get the feeling that there is something really special and individual going on in the music.

Crackleknob has a similar place in my heart, but is totally different in execution. The cycles I mentioned in the trio with Fred and Jason are still there, but with Mary and Reuben (and this may be primarily because of our longer history), the whole group just works more fluidly. Instead of adding my cycle and letting it sit atop the others, or in a silence, or in opposition to the other music going on, Crackleknob is more like an organism. When you introduce something new into the body of it, other things change and you can be much more active in how those things change. I get the feeling with Mary and Reuben that there are three objects spinning at different rates simultaneously and that all three of us have the ability to musically reach out and slow down or speed up or stop the other objects by introducing certain things into the overall mix. You still have moments where things do not move in the direction you are thinking they will, but the reaction time of the group is so ridiculously fast that there is never a feeling of being left out to dry or that a misstep has been made. As opposed to the “Hammer” trio, I think Crackleknob works best when the three of us are making something specifically as a trio, not as three personalities. I like both kinds of music a lot. As opposed to the warmth that is perceived in the individual’s playing in the trio with Fred and Jason, Crackleknob tends to pour that humanity into a single, pointed statement.

Transit is very special to me. It was one of the first bands, along with Mike Pride/Jonathan Moritz’s Evil Eye, that I played in when I got to New York. It’s how I met Reuben, which obviously, has been a really important relationship for me, and even though we don’t play that much any more as a quartet, we have never had a boring gig. The band just clicks. I think you are right about the fact that it moves away from the Ornette conception of the two horn and rhythm free jazz unit. I think that is a direct result of all of us meeting at a time when we were exploring a lot of different, non-jazz musics. I know that Reuben and I were getting into more modern classical and experimental improvised music around that time and Seth was moving towards more of a rock conception, and I think Jeff just thinks in a different and beautiful way on the drumset, producing something that somehow sounds revolutionary while dealing with the drumset in its historical context. We never tried to write pieces for the group. We never talked about what we thought we should play. We never forced our own musical agenda on the other members, even now when we are all in very different aesthetics when it comes to our own work. I don’t think the group, or any of these groups for that matter, could have stayed together this long without the attitude by all the players that whatever you are doing on your own stays at home when this group plays. This isn’t to say that there is none of that in the playing, but it happens naturally, it’s not like I am coming in and saying “I am now doing stuff with amplifier and hard noise, so you’d better turn up Mary, because this is where I will be going tonight”. This is improvisation, of course, so true conversation is what is supposed to happen, but I think it happens so organically and without questioning in these groups that it is worth mentioning.

It’s interesting that you mention “complexity for complexity’s sake” (the Derrida comment). Or that’s what I take you to mean – and that there is nothing wrong with such an approach. In fact, on that tangent, I notice several moments of surprise and confounding on Transit – one instance where the band is cooking in a traditional free-bop sense and everybody just stops. There is a pause and things return to a more pan-tempo sonic exploration. Would you say that there are conscious occasions where abstract structures, preordained or not, take the place of “feel?”

To that end, could you talk about your perception of “free playing” and how you reconcile improvisation and structure? Is the group its own structure (i.e., the piece is the performers)?

As far as complexity goes, it is always completely subjective. For example, when talking about “reading Derrida for its own sake” or trying to unlock some kind of understanding from a particularly knotty Derek Bailey recording, there has to be a level of interest to begin with. Usually, when it is a work that is “difficult” for lack of a better term, I find there is an unarticulated quality in it that draws me in. I WANT to understand it. I WANT to unlock the secret. I don’t even know what the secret is, but it’s in there somewhere and I need to figure it out, and each time I sit down and listen, or read, or look at or think about the work, it seems a little more open to me. It’s like Aldous Huxley said in one of his later essays, the key to art being great is the fact that it forces you to reinvestigate it over and over again, that it doesn’t seem to have an end where everything is clear and there is no further ground to be covered.

Like I said, it is completely a personal thing and totally subjective, but I don’t want to waste my time on something that doesn’t seem like it has a payoff that I want to actually see or understand. I don’t like concept music. I don’t want the liner notes to be the link to appreciating the piece of music. If that is the case, then I would rather just have someone explain the concept and just walk away. I don’t need to hear the music and I probably have all the information I need to be a happy, centered human being. That doesn’t mean it is a bad composition, it just isn’t interesting to me and I waste enough of my time dealing with things that aren’t of interest to me just to stay alive, without doing it out of a sense of intellectual obligation or completion.

The Transit bit happened because we all felt that silence and the move away from swing. We just happened to do it simultaneously. That is one of the powers of that group I think. I’ve been in bands where someone is really trying to direct the form of the piece in an overt way, either by explaining or writing something out or just through their playing. Sometimes it works on a certain level, especially when the person directing it can be really subtle about it, but the more pressure or the more one person’s personality begins to dominate, and I am thinking solely about improvised music right now, the flatter the music becomes to me. I guess that kind of starts to answer your question about form, although it is a much more complex question.

Form, for me, and I am thinking specifically of freely improvised settings because that is what we are talking about with the Hammer trio and Crackleknob, is always at the front of my mind. I know this is at odds with what I just said about trying to control music, however when I say form, I’m not thinking about something that is set, but it is always fluid and about spontaneous decision making as opposed to strategies. Like I said, I think of cycles and how my playing affects the cycles of those around me. I really do think about this on a number of different levels, but the beautiful thing to my mind is that as you change the way you relate to the form of the piece musically, it opens up a new set of ways for the other players to react, which in turn opens up another set of decisions. It is an infinitely, and hopefully organically, changing form that we are all participating in. In a way, I think this has something to do with the “unarticulated quality” that I try to unlock when hearing a new piece of music. I began thinking about form, not only on a piece by piece basis, but in the sense of how the decision you are making now changes the entire set, or the entire evening or ultimately your whole musical output. When I am really thinking of a large scale form like this, say, over the course of a whole evening, I hear the other players differently and I tend to be more concise in the way that I play. Even if it is a very extroverted set and I’m not thinking about every note I am playing, the way that all the players are directing the energy of their phrases, the density of your own playing, the group’s sound, the velocity and intensity of the different lines, adds up to a sort of form. At its most abstract (in my world, and to use examples we have been talking about) you get the trio with Fred and Jason where information is stored up by the players and the counterpoint may play itself out over months of different concerts, or at its most expository you get Crackleknob where every piece is self contained, the information is given, dealt with or discarded and wrapped up as quickly and as elegantly as possible, and when the next piece starts, it becomes its own new and self contained form.

All this changes depending on what you are doing. It is an interesting idea to think of form as cycles and at varying temporal levels, but it doesn’t work for me in a band that has compositions with well-defined improvisational spaces. That is a different matter altogether and then the challenge and the joy of playing is in how you connect the predetermined form and make the tune sound great. Everything has its place and has its mode of being. Form is no different. It has to be redefined for every gig. Just like sound and harmony and rhythm and my relation to all of that material needs to be redefined for every gig.

Could you talk about concision a bit more?

It is something I think about a lot. My friend Ben Hall (a great percussionist from Detroit), summed it up as a “lack of waste motion”, and I’ve always loved the way he phrased it. To me, it is about conservation of energy and trying to cram the most potency into the least amount of musical space. Personally, I grew up in a culture where I never felt a need to hear myself speak. The people around me in Oregon spoke only when they were trying to get a point across and otherwise lived in a comfortable silence with each other. Do you know that silence you have with a good friend, where you don’t feel the need to keep a conversation up? That seemed to me like standard operating procedure with everyone I knew. Small talk does not come easily to me and so I just tend to be quiet until I have something to add or feel like I can contribute in a positive way. It’s hell at a cocktail party, and I don’t pass out many business cards, but it is where I am most socially at ease.

Musically, I guess, it is the same thing. It is more aesthetically and personally comfortable for me to sit and listen and wait until there is something to add then to continue playing and wait for something to come out that I can latch on to. My internal rhythm is really, really fast actually. Lytton and I have talked about this a little, because we have very similar “at rest tempos” meaning the velocity that we tend to be most relaxed in. On the newest duo record, there are parts when we both indulge in that velocity and it is evident. For me, it is a matter of hearing music at the fast tempo in my head and either playing only every 17th note that I hear, or waiting until that velocity or density makes the most sense and actually adds something to the music.

For a long time, I have worked on giving every single sound a personality. Beyond each pitch there needs to be a dynamic, an articulation, a timbre, a sort of velocity and density – basically, intent or voice. To endeavor to play that way is to endeavor to be in a losing battle, at least with my brain power and technical prowess on the trumpet, but the more I try and play with those things in mind the less waste motion I can have. I am finally coming to a technical place on the horn where I can approach the density I hear in my head and still give every note the sonic attention I want. At this point, after so many years of having to slow myself way down to make sure I am being rigorous about how I’m presenting my material, I think the intention and speed in which I enter and exit the music has become a part of my language, as much as what happens while I’m playing. It’s not something many people may hear on recording or live, but I know when I’m not being precise and I usually leave the gig pretty down on myself.

NOISY HAMMERS

I’d like to talk about Throw down Your Hammer and Sing (Porter, 2009). It’s a heavy disc and I aligned it somewhat with electro-acoustic improvisation of the “old school” variety. My review discussed that in terms of sonic blends and extension of traditional/non-traditional instrumental capability. My friend Kurt (Johnson, bassist) was surprised as well to hear Roebke in such a context. I, for one, was less aware of your connection to that arm of contemporary music, mostly because I don’t follow “noise” at all.

The Porter disc seems to have split people squarely down the middle between love and hate, and now that I’m coming to grips with that, I’m pretty pleased. A lot of people have been talking about Roebke on this record, but I knew him initially as this kind of “noise” player through a trio we did with Tim Barnes about 5 years ago. I am always more shocked when he plays time! We did a concert in Chicago with the trio plus Paul Lytton and Jason swung his ass off the whole time. It was really great!

I have released vinyl and cassettes (limited edition with hand done artwork) in the past few years, basically the same type of music, but on noise labels and they will sell out in less than a month. I think those guys have figured out a way to capture the complete package that attracted me, at least, to jazz and improv in the first place. You know, holding the record cover in your hands, staring at Miles or Coltrane or a hirsute 70s Evan Parker while the disc spins. I hope that CDs aren’t going anywhere, but I know way more people that downloaded the Porter release than bought the disc.

The noise stuff is difficult for me as well. There are only a handful of people that I really keep up with, like C. Spencer Yeh and Dominic Fernow. There are two guys in Michigan that I play with (Ben Hall, Hans Buetow) in a band called Melee and their interest is genre-crossing with free jazz musicians. They own Broken Research Records and released the duo LP I did with Paul Lytton as well as with Melee and Joe Morris which is really great. I think they even did a project with Bill Dixon, although I’m not sure if that will ever see the light of day.

There are also other interesting folks like John Wiese and Carlos Giffoni (again, pretty popular players) and the rock guys like Hair Police and Ex Cocaine. My listening doesn’t go that deep into it and I guess I’m more interested in the people that sound like Tony Conrad or James Tenney/Ken Gaburo. (As for the work with Lytton, it is interesting stuff. Paul has always been a hero of mine, and his electronics are great as well – very under-recorded. We will do another duo in a month or so, hopefully to come out on PSI and a trio tour with Christian Weber in the fall. I’m looking forward to that; it’s really my absolute favorite playing to do, although I just get my butt kicked the whole time.)

Indeed, listening to odd-meter rock bands and things like Sonic Youth in the 90s probably prepared me for improvised music because rock/punk eventually just didn’t go far enough for me.

That’s funny. I grew up on jazz. My dad is a journeyman saxophonist whose listening ends at Paul Desmond. Free jazz was my rebellion, although my dad has seen Cecil and Ornette more times than I have! I’m just now coming to rock. I just listened to my first Zeppelin record a year ago, finally catching up with prog-rock and Gastr del Sol and Jim O’Rourke since doing some records with David Grubbs. Now he’s been passing me a bunch of Circle X and The Endtables and Jandek as well. My wife isn’t too happy about it, but it has been a new world of listening.

I came to a lot of rock after realizing how limited my concept of the modern noise thing was, going back through Whitehouse and then into Coil and Gong and Soft Machine and whatever Spencer Yeh would give me when I went to Cincinnati.

DEEP IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD OF HISTORY AND INFLUENCE

Could you talk a bit about Bill Dixon? I know he’s been formative in your approach to the horn. Did you meet or play with him, or just speak on the phone?

I never met Bill, sadly. He asked me at one point to be one of his “last students” along with Canadian trumpeter Gordon Allen, but that didn’t work out. It was a good end to a long period of hero worship (in general, not just for Bill) for me and ultimately set me on my own road, so in a way, I got a great lesson, regardless of the strange winding road it took to get me there. It still would have been nice to play together. I see the recordings with Taylor [Ho Bynum] and Stephen [Haynes] and Rob [Mazurek] and I can’t help but feel a little pang of regret, but that’s the way it goes sometimes. You’re a human before you are a trumpet player.

I’m still, as a listener, unlocking a lot of what he’s said/done and spending time with him led me to a greater understanding of the trumpet. He’s really something. Taylor and Rob are certainly their own men, but you can also hear a very, very strong Dixon influence – especially in the former.

The experience just grounded me a little and also got me to be my own man, which ultimately was a good thing, I think, and is something I think Bill would approve of. I really should drop him a line. It has been too long. Maybe I’ll send him some of the newer stuff, just let him know how much I’ve appreciated his example.

I had a few phone calls from Bill when I lived in Denver and it really did unlock the answers to a lot of aesthetic and technical questions I had, pushed me to take a lot of risks that I think I would have stayed away from had I not had his encouragement. I was just thinking last night about how the few conversations I’ve had with him unlocked so many other things my “legit” teachers over the years told me.

I can imagine that getting out of “following” a certain mold – especially during those formative years as an improviser – could be a little tough, especially when one is looking to a certain player as a potential teacher. It seems to me that for soloists, composers and conceptualists (loathsome as that word is), the trumpet is getting a sort of newfound recognition among younger players. Not that you, Taylor, Rob, and Peter Evans are “the same” in any respect or even adhere to a school. But would you care to speak to that adage of “young trumpeters/extended techniques” a bit?

I don’t know that I can really speak to the young trumpet player/extended technique question. I know my relationship to it and may have something of an idea of how someone like Peter got there, just because we talk a lot and I have a pretty good handle on where he’s coming from and his history, same with Taylor although I have a much different musical relationship with him and I’m not sure I could speak to his ideas as readily. I’ve never met Rob, so that would be very difficult.

For me, the extended technique thing was never a cut and dried issue. I never set out to learn extended techniques, per se, but early on, my trumpet technique was severely lacking, and so I couldn’t build tension or create excitement (in a jazz setting especially) like I would hear someone like Dave Douglas or Clifford Brown or Lee Morgan do. I couldn’t play very high or particularly fast, so I had to look to alternatives to say something meaningful to me on the instrument. I’ve always been a pretty solitary worker, so besides just trying very hard to get more technique on the horn, I spent a lot of time thinking about what, to my mind, an improviser has to deal with and what I could use, what I already possessed or could easily possess through practice to become more of a basis or technique than the standard trumpet technique.

So, going beyond the harmonic, rhythmic and melodic building blocks (which I still worked on), I put more thought into things like silence, dynamics, articulation, and especially timbre. The idea was that, if I could place the right notes in time correctly and add as much nuance as possible, it would make up for some of the flash of highly technical playing that I was missing. Timbrally, I had more of a personal connection with vocal type sounds than simple changes in trumpet tone and especially things that had more of a connotation to more intense emotions, like screams, distracted mumbling, wails, and so those are the sounds I dealt with. I never really went through a process of learning them technically, but found if I heard the sound deeply enough, I could find a way to make it manifest on the horn. It really was and is all about some sort of visceral reaction to me and so whatever I could do to get that across was where I went with my practice.

The thing about all the extended techniques on trumpet is that such an approach is not new. There has been a certain sort of attention paid to Peter and Axel Doerner and Taylor and what they do is absolutely an individual thing, but it’s not coming out of a vacuum. I discovered when I got to New York that there were people like Greg Kelley and Tom Djll dealing with, if not the same language, at least the same idea of language as I was, and then to dig back, there are people like Wadada Leo Smith and Herb Robertson and Paul Smoker, all of whom were heroes for me in high school, and then you get to people like Ed Harkins and Toshinori Kondo (especially the early 80s stuff) that is absolutely alien. It’s been going on all this time and I think, in a way, this is just the generation that has a handful of players to take to this kind of music and get a little notice for it. I mean obviously Leo and Herbie and all these guys are getting press, too, but all of a sudden, there are a group of players of roughly the same age in roughly the same geographical area, usually working with each other, that have similar ideas of language, whereas before the extended technique playing was happening in more isolated instances.

Now, that is a long and very subjective answer, but that is my understanding of what is happening. I am also seeing a generation younger than me using a lot of the extended techniques as part of their language, and so I’m not really sure where that will go. My greatest fear is that these sounds become a bag of tricks that get strung together without a context. I heard an album recently where I really could recognize every technique based on who it was from initially, like “There’s Peter, there’s Greg Kelley, there’s one of mine, there’s a Bill Dixon, etc.” and while it was really impressive I wondered where the music was coming from. I’ve tried really hard to get away from my own, almost obsessive hero worship and it was mostly because I could listen back to myself and go “there’s Dave Douglas, there’s Dave Ballou, there’s a Herb Robertson, there’s a Clifford Brown, etc.” and it was, to my mind, bereft of meaning. It is something everyone has to go through, but I get nervous when I hear it happening, because historically very few people do get out of that cycle. I know it is still very hard for me and I wouldn’t say that I’m anywhere close to a completely personal language, nor do I think I ever will be, but it seems like the effort is worth it in the long run.

It is actually something I think about a lot. Recently, Dan Warburton asked the normal “favorite trumpet” players question and it really set off a lot of questions in my head about my relationship with all of that history, not only the instrument’s history, but my history with music as well. I hope it doesn’t sound pretentious. I am not trying to say that I’ve gained some sort of transcendent attitude about music and improvising. That simply isn’t the case, but everyone has to, at some point, consciously or unconsciously, pick a path and the path most interesting to me is taking the risks to try and find my own way of playing, whether it ends up being original or “new” or not. It’s the common goal of being an artist, not anything new at all, and I’m not suggesting that it is, but it just plays in very deeply to why I have chosen to pick certain extended techniques over others.

It’s interesting to think about technique in terms of what you “can’t” do and using it to your advantage to create a language or an amalgam of signs/phrases that does speak to your creativity, abilities, or whatever else. When I first became interested in this music, the history thing was very important and for me to ground myself in what a current player is doing I had to relate it back to what someone else had done. Now I don’t find that as useful and in fact find – as a critic – a bit of aphasia when describing what a player sounds like.

Funny enough, most fans I’ve run into at shows (there are some in Texas!) seem way more into what the old guard are doing rather than what younger players are up to. But there are a lot of very individual concepts and approaches to improvisation and it seems like those are really getting borne out and clarified in new recordings. To me, it seems like there are actual directions manifested whereas a decade ago, that wasn’t quite as clear.

Here’s a more general question - how have you seen the creative music economy/climate changing in the time that you’ve been involved with it? Do you think the lessening of “hero worship” across the scene is helping it define itself better?

I don’t know too much about the creative music economy or climate, honestly. It has always been a bit of a mystery to me. I guess my relation to it has changed, but I’m not sure that that is because of any inherent change in the way creative music works or is perceived (if at all) by the public. Many of the improvisers or creative musicians I know work outside of music for a living. I work a 40 hour a week job and play 4 or 5 nights a week. I think that kind of work load for a musician is pretty standard in New York. I feel pretty lucky to be able to pay my bills and play as much as that and I’m not trying to play up the amount of hectic running around to show how “we are all suffering for our magical art”. I really don’t believe in it, and find that romantic notion of being miserable so that you can make good music a complete waste of energy. You just do what you have to in order to keep your life together.

As for the change in the culture of experimental or improvised music, I’m not sure that hero worship has been very prevalent historically. I think that may have been my issue more than it is for others in the field, and primarily because I grew up heavily in jazz and especially in the university system which, whether it tries to or not, breeds that kind of attitude. I think there is more communication now then there ever has been amongst musicians around the world, and that has more to do with any kind of feeling of cohesion than anything else. In the past months, I’ve played gigs with people from Switzerland, Germany, Australia, Norway and Taiwan, and I am by no means a superstar of the music, so I think that just shows how open the channels of communication are right now and how easy it is to meet, talk to and play with like-minded musicians without geography being the barrier it has been in the past.

So, when all those players are getting the opportunity to spend time with each other and talk about music in general or even just share a beer and talk about TV or movies or something completely unrelated, I think that can contribute to some sort of unifying effect. We don’t have a discrete “scene” any more the way that there was a “loft scene” in the 1970s or 52nd street in the 40s and 50s. Clubs come in and out, and I’m just talking about New York because that is the experience I have; it may be different elsewhere. There isn’t a central area that you can go and know that you will see a certain group of musicians working towards a common aesthetic goal.

The trade off, though, is that the pool is much wider. The communication is more intense, because of the natural limitation of time and cost. It’s just a different set of circumstances now. From a marketing standpoint, it is harder to create a band and keep it working with the same personnel day in and day out. Okay, so that’s the reality, you have to find a creative way to deal with that and still get your point across. For me, that hasn’t changed over the years. It would be interesting to ask someone like Bill Dixon or Jack Wright or Tony Conrad this question as they have been through a much wider temporal cross section and have a better handle on how things have changed.

I hope that makes some sort of sense. It is a difficult question for me to answer. I’ve never really felt like I was part of any scene or class or group. For the most part, I play the concert and go home, which means I miss out on a lot of what makes a scene cohesive or defined as such. That’s just my own decision and not based on any kind of dislike or disinterest in other musicians. I just feel more comfortable being alone than in large crowds. That’s a lot of personal information that has nothing to do with the question, but I bring it up to hopefully explain out some of the lack of information I have on the way that the community is developing socially or aesthetically.

It seems like, with a few exceptions, you’ve been working in drummer-less groups lately.

I don’t think I actively seek any particular instrumentation, or have excluded drums on purpose as of late. I do a lot with Paul Lytton and Ben Hall, and play in a lot of drummer-led groups, like those of Harris Eisenstadt and Tomas Fujiwara, but I did have a period where I noticed that certain musical habits were more present when there was a drum/bass combination. I don’t really feel that confident in my rhythmic feel, my ability to just lay out interesting eighth note lines. It was something that I had a certain amount of skill with at one time, but my head just isn’t there anymore, so when there is a drummer and a bass player that are interested in creating that kind of swing, or being supportive underneath a soloist I am less comfortable, or rather I feel less satisfied with my own playing.

It really has taken a year or so playing with Lytton to feel remotely confident with him, just because, again there is a certain twisted historical context in my mind when I hear him playing drum set, and I really had to struggle to get away from that desire to try and replicate (poorly) the duos with Evan Parker, or any of the other recordings he has graced over the years. The same thing with more traditional drummers – I have a tendency to fall into a pattern of replication that is not as musically successful to me.

As for Crackleknob, like any of the other groups (the same could definitely be said about the trio with Fred and Jason, or duo with Peter Evans or duo with Joe Morris), the actual instrumentation, detached from the personality of the musician is beside the point. Mary could play autoharp and Reuben could play tuba and Crackleknob would still exist as it does now. Luckily, the guitar and bass really meld together beautifully, but the trio started more as a chance to see each other more often and play in a less controlled setting than we had been able to up to that point.

The instrumentation of guitar and bass, and especially the way Mary and Reuben play them, allows me a lot of flexibility as an improviser. I think Mary and Reuben would say the same thing of the trio. Any one of us at any time can be the “soloist” or the “time keeper” or the person delineating the harmony, and, for me at least, it was the first group I was in where I really felt comfortable, just being part of a texture melodically and not having to lay down beds of white noise to remove myself from the position of melodic instrument. That is the hard thing about being a horn player in these kinds of situations, for me at least. The perception is that you are the lead instrument. People’s ears are generally tuned to that. The trumpet comes in and we think that this must be the primary line or melody or solo. With Crackleknob, I feel like I can play little filigree stuff softly and Mary can be the melodic line and Reuben can be soloing and there is no major mental adjustment that needs to take place. It just happens naturally. The other thing for me that makes it such a comfortable and enjoyable group for me is just the natural friendship that we all enjoy. We can easily exist outside of music, which is rare for a group, in my experience.

And one last thought about the drum conundrum. I have been thinking about it a lot since you brought it up. Beyond the historical love I have for drums (I’m probably a bigger fan of drummers than trumpet), and the part that love plays in my own work to drop some of my habits and develop a different set of rules for myself, there is the issue of volume. I am not a loud trumpet player. I can be loud, but it severely limits what I can technically do on the horn and so, until I really began the work with the amplifier and feedback, there were a lot of percussionists that just wrecked me to play with. Not necessarily that they were even that loud, but it was just enough to make me lose that feeling of relaxation, and then that is when your mind begins thinking about technique and the habits come back.

What haven’t you done yet that you would like to do? I know a lot of things come from experience and in the moment, but is there anything in the works either conceptually or from a band/release standpoint that you find yourself “turning towards” (or for that matter, “turning away from”)?

I don’t really have anything at this point that I feel like I’m missing out on, or is on my mind. Right now I’m finding myself at a hyper-critical point in my improvising, so most of my time is being spent trying to get to a place where I am happy with the way I’m playing, trying to break some habits, and just generally feel like an improviser with a capital I again. I have a month off from gigs and so all my energy is going into that right now.

Of course, there are a lot of people that I would love to play with, but right now, all of my energy is tied up in working on my own playing and developing further the projects that are already developing. In addition to finishing up the duo record with Paul Lytton, which I think will come out on Psi, there’ll be a trio with Paul and Christian Weber. Also I’m going to record another New York Quintet, duos with Peter Evans and Joe Morris. Of course I plan to continue with the Hammer trio, Crackleknob, and collaborate with Harris Eisenstadt and Daniel Levin. None of those things have been used up yet, so I keep plugging away, making music and trying to keep it together as a human being.

Selected Discography:

Daniel Levin Quartet, Live at Roulette (Clean Feed, 2009)
Transit, Quadrologues (Clean Feed, 2009)
Halvorson/Radding/Wooley, Crackleknob (Hat Hut, 2009)
Nate Wooley, Throw Down Your Hammer and Sing (Porter, 2009)
Lytton/Wooley Duo, untitled (Broken Research, 2008)
Graveyards, Tape Reading Radio Lines (American Tapes, 2008)
Melee, Newest Ruins (Broken Research, 2006)
Daniel Levin Quartet, Some Trees (Hat Hut, 2006)
Stephen Gauci Quartet, Absolute, Absolutely (CIMP, 2006)
Transit, Transit (Clean Feed, 2005)

*photos by Peter Gannushkin

Tags: Bill Dixon, free jazz, Nate Wooley, trumpet