(Free Jazz, Avant-Garde Jazz) Paul Lytton & Nate Wooley + Ikue Mori & Ken Vandermark - The Nows (2CD) - 2012, FLAC (tracks+.cue), lossless

Disc One recorded live at The Stone, NYC, March 2, 2011
Disc Two recorded live at The Hideout, Chicago, March 16, 2011

End of the year. Time for judgments. Nate Wooley is my favourite 2012 trumpet player. An overview of all the astounding releases he has given us during this year could justify a monographic review of many pages. I realized my admiration even better after this impressive work done in collaboration with the veteran and pioneer drummer Paul Lytton, and featuring Ikue Mori and Ken Vandermark as well. The suppleness of registers and styles that Wooley deploys, with results always at ease, is really mind-boggling. He can easily switch from pure experimentalism delving into rumorism à la Toshinori Kondo and Axel Dörner (to be more frequently found in his solo productions or in superb collaborations with the other young trumpet phenomenon Peter Evans) to more traditional and sentimental phrasings à la Magnus Broo. I’ve never seen him live, so I really wonder which kind of amplifying settings he adopts to achieve this sound. Obviously the 35 minutes long “Free Will, Free Won’t” is an exhaustive manifesto of such an attitude. We find blasting open notes sounding like scratches on vinyl, raucous and screeching passages with the marching Lytton’s drums running after. Some unbelievably long notes achieved with circular breathing transfigure in drone carpets. In the meanwhile Lytton amuse himself with thousands of Mikado sticks - I like to think he’s indeed using these - hitting every inch of skin, metal and wood he can reach. For many minutes in the second half of this composition Wooley doesn’t produce anymore a single recognizable note. He plays instead with the air silently blown in his instrument’s tubing. Ikue Mori creates in “Abstractions and Repetitions” a minimal electronics scenario where Lytton inserts subtle and far interludes of clangors and beats while Wooley seems to explore the vocal potentialities of trumpet. As Meredith Monk could do. I personally consider not to be missed the last four minutes of intensive dialogue between Mori and Lytton in “Berlyne’s Law”. “Men Caught Staring” opening disc two is another gem offering the duo’s total music vision, comfortably oscillating between innovation (watch out for Wooley's distorted synth and “Vocoder” starting around minute ten or the gibberish effect in the final part!) and solid, awe-inspiring free interplay as in the short and perfect “The Information Bomb”. The presence of Vandermark’s sax starting from “Automatic” drives Wooley and Lytton to more traditional but not less remarkable soundscapes. Brasses face each other through long sentences joining in emotional crescendos. Lytton is now set free for long soloing and when the other two musicians come back are clearly influenced from the rhythmic environment he has built, choosing at first a short syncopated conversation, and then intensifying the groove up to the final outburst. This is a live recording. Sound quality is outstanding. Quantity is seldom a per se value, but we have here one hundred and nine minutes of pure, passionate, involving high quality music. I regret to not have included this in my personal 2012 Best Album List. Sincere thanks as a listener to Clean Feed for its productive efforts in the field of free jazz. It is, in my opinion, the label that has contributed more than any other to the production of memorable music during 2012. Music that will certainly last for many years to come. ~ paolo casertano, freejazzblog.org, december 31, 2012
Ultra-progressive jazz and avant-garde expressionism are trumpeter Nate Wooley's toy stores, so to speak. He's well-established in the modern era's radical music scene and teams here with venerable Euro-jazz percussionist Paul Lytton, equating to a vivid snapshot of the duo's 2011 US tour. Brilliant minds think alike, and the proof resides in the multifarious modes of delivery conjured up by these artists. It's not only about stirring improvisational encounters, because the musicians also sculpture a seemingly endless array of sounds, employing multiphonics and tonal diversions amid moments of anguish, jocularity, and brazen exchanges. Culled from the duo's performance at The Stone in New York City, the musicians merge sheets of nimble movements, and use space to counter torrential downpours, often amplified by Wooley's raspy-toned attack in conjunction with Lytton's expansive arsenal and fluid pulses. A good deal of the album's polytonal mechanisms stem from the percussionist's armada of small implements, used to contour the perimeters of free-form expressionism, rather uncannily mustering a bigger presence, like a jagged histogram with a surfeit of dips and spikes. On "Automatic," computer sound-shaping denizen Ikue Mori intersperses streaming effects and underlines the asymmetrical rhythmic component with buzzing intersections while generating an amorphous underpinning for her cohorts' unwieldy dialogues. Sax ace Ken Vandermark sits in with the duo during the show at Chicago's Hideout venue, and is as an igniter on three tracks, where doomsday-like notions and a fast and furious chess match come to fruition. But Wooley and Lytton broadcast a myriad of heated developments. Through it all, Lytton's snappy rhythms and Wooley's fiery outbursts meld unusual tonal contrasts, brisk accentuations, and strangely ethereal sub-plots. In sum, the musicians project a symposium of fleeting thoughts and emotional upheavals while sustaining interest from beginning to end. ~ glenn astarita, allaboutjazz.com, january 2, 2013
Consider the great duos of the cinema, Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn, Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, Bruce Willis and Samuel L. Jackson and so on-what each successful duo has in common, is a chemistry, an attraction or spark between them. Such is the case with the musical duo of percussionist Paul Lytton and trumpeter Nate Wooley. What each of those film stars also has, is individual talent capable of starring in a lead role sans partner. Likewise, Lytton and Wooley (his junior by some 27 years) are masters of their own instruments. Lytton was a force behind the London free jazz scene of the 1960s, he founded the London Music Collective with (among others) Evan Parker and Derek Bailey. His drums can be heard behind groups led by Barry Guy and the American leader Ken Vandermark. Wooley's trumpet is seemingly ubiquitous these days, in his quintet, solo performance, with groups led by Joe Morris or Mary Halvorson and in duo with Peter Evans. As with any fantastic partnership though, Lytton and Wooley always seem to raise their game when they are performing together. This album was recorded during their 2011 US tour, Disc One was recorded at New York's The Stone and Disc Two at the Hideout in Chicago. The session follows the duo recordings Creek Above 33 (Psi, 2010) and, like their recordings with guests The Seven Storey Mountain (Important, 2009) (with David Grubbs) and Six Feet Under (No Business, 2012) (with Christian Weber) the duo share the stage for half the discs in NY with Ikue Mori and Ken Vandermark in Chicago. Usually, extended technique -a gift both musicians share-is a recipe for a disjointed sound and an impulse killer. With Lytton and Wooley though, the opposite is true. The trumpeter's amplified growl and roar and his slurred shouts heighten the cymbal accents and drum traumas of Lytton. This disc, like their previous one never lacks for momentum. The pair play off each other's sounds, Lytton the scrambled eggs of metal-on-metal and Wooley the over-blown amplification of his horn. Adding Mori to mix up the electronics, Lytton and Wooley morph into to the duo of R2-D2 and C-3PO, crafting their conversation into a sci-fi dream. The balance of this duo doesn't so much shift towards Mori's computer electronics, as much as it makes room for her voice. Likewise, with Vandermark's horns. He supplies the repetitive pulse on "The Ripple Effect" with his baritone saxophone, enabling the duo to sculpt a freer sound. The track "Automatic" finds Vandermark blowing bass clarinet notes and Wooley following with some traditional trumpet accompaniment while Lytton whips up the energy. This fantastic duo is a perfect host to their guests, but certainly they are an act unto themselves. ~ mark corroto, allaboutjazz.com, november 2, 2012
The duo of the veteran and pioneer Paul Lytton and the innovative newcomer Nate Wooley is one of the most powerful and intriguing of these last years. They managed to revalue this old instrumental format, seeing it not only as the most basic structure of interactive improvisation but also as a kind of metonymy of all the processes and lexical resources possible in this field. That’s why after one masterpiece like “Creak Above 33” and a deeper and deeper application of their “one-to-one seeming more” ideas, they invited other musicians to join them. On stage people of several generations of the improv scene like Fred Frith, C Spencer Yeh, Ben Hall, Evan Parker and John Russell, among others, and on record musicians of the relevance of Christian Weber (“Six Feet Under”) and David Grubbs (“The Seven Storey Mountain”). At John Zorn’s The Stone they played in 2011 with Ikue Mori and two weeks later they stepped at Chicago's Hideout with Ken Vandermark, besides presenting the original duet. The recordings of those dates are now reunited in a double album that enables you to fully understand that the Lytton/Wooley partnership is the same when only the two are involved and when there’s a “special guest”. The trios with Vandermark and Mori aren’t duos plus one, and neither the duos aren’t a return to the essentials: everything is in perspective, accomplishing the old aspiration to create collective music in which the individuality of the participants isn’t damaged in any way. What a lesson! ~ cleanfeed-records.com
The follow up to the Lytton/Wooley sophomore release "Creak Above 33" on Psi Records, has just been released. The Nows is a document of the duos 2011 American tour documenting two complete shows on a double-disc set from Clean Feed Records. The first disc is from The Stone in New York and features a set with electronics mastermind Ikue Mori, and the second disc is from Chicago's The Hideout with the hardest working man in show business, Ken Vandermark on reeds. Besides the special guests, each disc features a blistering duo set with Lytton on drum kit and Wooley on trumpet and amplifier. ~ natewooley.com