Nate Wooley Quartet

jazz

On a recent live recording, trumpeter Nate Wooley introduces his final number by promising a "nice little melody embedded in the typical Nate Wooley crap." That "crap" is the menagerie of squeals, blurts, rasps and grunts Wooley routinely squeezes out of his horn, though with this quartet the nice little melodies are equally typical. Wooley approaches the trumpet as a sound-making machine and composition as the creation of an environment, with equal emphasis on silences and textures. Raised in a Finnish-American fishing village in Oregon, Wooley plays music that maintains the stillness, jarring quirks and jagged edges that characterize the cinema of his Scandinavian forebears. Remarkably few modern trumpeters manage to escape the looming shadow of Miles Davis and find their own voice. Forget New York (and ignore the fact that Wooley now resides in Jersey City) — the new jazz scene is all about the hinterlands.

Thu., July 21, 8 p.m., free, The Rotunda, 4014 Walnut St., www.arsnovaworkshop.com.

—Shaun Brady

-- Respond to this article in our Forums -- click to jump there