Label: Pleasure of the Text Recordings, 2021
Personnel - Nate Wooley: trumpet; Ingrid Laubrock: tenor saxophone; Sylvie Courvoisier: piano; Cory Smithe: piano; Matt Moran: vibraphone; Joshua Modney; violin; Maria Roberts: Cello; Russell Greenberg: percussion.
For this stunning new double-album, the Brooklyn-based trumpeter and bandleader Nate Wooley, a notable figure in the avant-garde jazz scene, asks his bandmates to use their gifts and decision-making ability throughout eight ensemble concertos devised with an inventive compositional system of his own. Given certain pre-established rules, each member have to decide what to play, firstly as a human being and secondly as a musician, developing musical sequences that, going beyond expectation, blossom into completely new vistas than those presented on paper. The results are astounding, and the group forges inimitable sequences, probing both diaphanous atmospheres and spiky musical razors that invite us to picture worlds beyond the tapestries of sound.
“Mutual Aid Music I” plunges in a lachrymose state, fluctuating between the ethereal and the substantial with the trumpeter at the helm. A beautiful cohesion is achieved - the piano work is phenomenal, the cellist saws away with purpose, the saxophone quietly brings a velvety smoothness with it and the violin introduces some acerbic rasps. It ends with moving trumpet and a chain of piano effects.
“Mutual Aid Music II” kicks off with trumpet and saxophone manifestations: Wooley employs his adamantine melodies of rare elegance, which serve as a foil for Ingrid Laubrock’s more temperamental curlicues. Later on, they have Matt Moran’s relaxing vibes mediating their conversation until Sylvie Courvoisier’s piano stirs some friction. A central rhythmic figure is addressed by everyone with different intonation and the piano, which can easily bend from cloudy to ecstatic, triggers a type of fanfare with trumpet and violin immersed in repetitive riffing and a more loose saxophone improvisation.
I found “Mutual Aid Music III” to be very emotional, oozing sentiment through every pore of its brittle skin, whereas “Mutual Aid Music IV” offers a stratospheric confluence of avant-jazz, modern classical and new music, in which the strings (in a first stage) and then the prepared piano (toward the finale) assume prominent roles.
The highlights of the second disc are “Mutual Aid Music I-I”, whose grandiose outset takes us to warped, hypnotic and eerie experimental atmospheres, and the 14-plus-minute “Mutual Aid Music IV-I”, where the group keeps varying the intriguing orchestral alchemy by dint of ostinatos, suspensions, gracious contrapuntal movements, pensive muse and emotional exteriorization.
This is a smart, masterful study in constructive music with a focused human perspective. Wooley stands out among the crowd of modern creative innovators, and Mutual Aid Music is his masterpiece for 2021.
Grade A
Favorite Tracks:
01 - Mutual Aid Music I ► 02 - Mutual Aid Music II ► 03 - Mutual Aid Music III