Our (fairly) regular roundup of Music & Arts related news from Chicago-based web media, featuring thoughts and insight from some of the city’s most dedicated writers.

• Nate Wooley’s coarse-grain trumpet meditations @ Lampo

  

  Nate Wooley. Photo by Peter Gannushkin

  Nate Wooley‘s trumpet playing, with its long lines and grainy textures, combines equally well with musical/tonal playing, free improvisation, and abstract composition. Unlike many modern improv players (brass-based or otherwise), Wooley’s first mark on the canvas is a line, not a point. His lush, strange, visceral sound (one reviewer called his work “exquisitely hostile”) cuts a path through the overgrown forest of free improv seemingly perpendicular to all other travelers. Like a hand-ground audio pigment, Wooley’s sound mixes well on a variety of canvases, capable of providing abstract shadows on large landscapes (including work in Anthony Braxton’s Tri-Centric Orchestra and also his trumpet quintet) or streaking across a stark white paper, trailing rough chunks and feathery dust (in solo improvisation works like [8] Syllables).

  Sometimes, Wooley combines his extended techniques on trumpet with electronics or processing, as on the Trumpet/Amplifier LP (Smeraldina-Rima), but his brilliant mastery of controlled lines and microtonal shifts of embouchure (as well as massive overdubbing of multiple different horns, mutes, microphones, room tone, etc.) allows for gorgeous, drone-based works like The Almond (Pogus Productions).

  This Saturday, Lampo will host Mr. Wooley’s latest composition, For Kenneth Gaburo. The composition will continue on with concepts used in The Almond, combined with his method of using vocal syllables while playing to shape the tones of his trumpet, as on his series of “Syllables” recordings. Using text from Gaburo’s works, the piece will combine “synthesized tones on tape with manipulated trumpet techniques to create shadings of the phonetic sounds inherent in the text.” This is a long work, and the program will conclude with several amplified trumpet improvisations from Mr. Wooley.

  The performance happens this Saturday, May 17, at the Graham Foundation‘s Madlener House (4 W. Burton Pl.) at 8 p.m. Admission is free, but RSVP is required. Follow the ticket link to reserve your place.

  

• Wednesday Afternoon Diversion: Jamming Baby Owls
  Here is what happens when one baby owl follows the movements of a camera and the other stays in a state of stone cold badass. [ more › ]
• Pencil This In: ‘You’re Being Ridiculous’ At Mary’s Attic
  Jeremy Owens’ live-lit series “You’re Being Ridiculous” returns May 16 for a three-weekend run at Mary’s Attic in Andersonville with a host of storytellers sharing tales on the subject of “change.” [ more › ]

Digest powered by RSS Digest

Comments are closed.