If the possibilities latent within the world of free or improvisational jazz seem limitless, still on Henry House the trumpeter Nate Wooley steps outside of the box. By now a veteran of the New York scene who has collaborated regularly with Anthony Braxton and Ken Vandermark, some of his recent work has included three volumes of Polarity in a duo with the firebrand saxophonist Ivo Perelman plus Seven Skies Orchestra as part of a foray with a larger ensemble, Chimaera where Sylvie Courvoisier was inspired by the symbolist painter Odilon Redon, on an album which also featured the electroacoustic glitch maverick Christian Fennesz and Wooley’s fellow trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith, plus Monochromes where Ingrid Laubrock manipulated his tape snippets and Laugh Ash from last year where he was part of Ches Smith’s stellar tentet.
In the meantime Wooley has continued to push other boundaries, as the trumpeter has realised compositions by Michael Pisaro-Liu and Michael Wolff while blurring the borders between jazz, noise and contemporary classical music with his own pieces for Mutual Aid Music then Four Experiments which tended towards the longform. For more than a decade he has been one of the foremost ‘chevaliers d’Occam’ in partnership with the continuous composer Ćliane Radigue, the tributaries of whose Occam series are intended to highlight the individual character of an array of acoustic instrumentalists.
Wooley has described his own Radigue collaboration Occam X – which utilises various mutes and a strip of sheet metal – as ‘a radical act of catastrophe’ which ‘encouraged me to rethink my practice as an instrumentalist and improviser’. The trumpeter has also collaborated with and reinterpreted the works of the late Yoshi Wada, a pioneering Fluxus practitioner and downtown scenester whose drone music of the seventies and eighties used bagpipes and his own ‘pipehorns’ which were constructed out of everyday plumbing materials. This penchant for sustained tones and drones was apparent last year on Moths, which Wooley composed for Eric Wubbels on piano, autoharp and voice, the clarinetist Madison Greenstone and the flautist Laura Cocks.
Wooley is also a writer, who traced and interrogated his collaboration with Radigue in Contemporary Music Review while for ten years and thirty issues he served as the founder and editor of the journal Sound American. Now on Henry House he brings many of these associations and pastimes to bear on what is described as a ‘recurring dream song’ and takes the form of a five-part song cycle.
Henry House expands on the ecstatic durational work of Seven Storey Mountain, a six-part composition which began with a couple of trio albums where Wooley played alongside Paul Lytton and David Grubbs and then Chris Corsano and C. Spencer Yeh, before expanding his ensemble to encompass multiple percussionists and brass plus a twenty-one-woman choir. A secular work which draws its title from the famous autobiography of the Trappist monk Thomas Merton, the six parts of Seven Storey Mountain featured tape manipulation and amplified strings and brass with Wooley handing his musicians personalised sets of instructions often somewhere between mere gesture and fully notated traditional score.
Emphasising teamwork and the mutable needs of the collective, the sixth and final part of the series arrived on Pyroclastic Records in 2020, with the likes of Samara Lubelski, Susan Alcorn, Ava Mendoza and the vocalist Megan Schubert joining up with Corsano and Yeh among others as Wooley incorporated three works in the form of a recording by Schubert of portions from the poet John Berryman’s prizewinning 77 Dream Songs, the drummer Will Guthrie’s staggering drill routine on ‘Breaking Bones’ and more clearly the folk singer Peggy Seeger’s protest song ‘Reclaim the Night’ which rails against rape and exploitation, whose opening lines feature on Seven Storey Mountain VI as a kind of mantra.
On the other hand the ritual of Henry House is portrayed as something slower, more natural and more serene as Wooley makes use of sine tones, tape editing, field recordings and detuned brass, piano and vibes while bringing along the violist Mat Maneri plus Megan Schubert who relay a fragmented narrative through their steadfast, arresting and sometimes conversational spoken word.
The first long piece by Wooley which does not feature his distinctive trumpet, instead he rooted Henry House in two texts which he stitched together from four disparate sources. Most apparent from the title, he adapted the Dream Songs of Berryman, which follow a certain Henry whose surname is sometimes given as House and who has often been identified with the author, though Berryman in a preface to a later edition wrote that the poem:
is essentially about an imaginary character (not the poet, not me) named Henry, a white American in early middle age sometimes in blackface, who has suffered an irreversible loss and talks about himself sometimes in the first person, sometimes in the third, and sometimes even in the second; he has a friend, never named, who addresses him as Mr Bones and variants thereof.
Wooley also draws from the biography Kafka: The Decisive Years by Reiner Stach, which pulled extensively from the Prague author’s journals, letters and literary fragments, as well as from The Bottom of the Harbor by the quintessential New York portraitist Joseph Mitchell and The Long-Legged House which was the first collection of essays by the Kentucky writer and environmentalist Wendell Berry, part memoir and part homecoming as he also touched upon political themes like strip mining and the Vietnam War.
Characterised as a ‘strange funeral mass for a fictional everyman’, from these four texts Wooley culled phrases and sentences to create two cento poems or collages which he then rewrote and restructured over a period of time, in the hopes of finding a fresh narrative hidden within. The process bears comparison with the modernist poetry of Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, or with the cut-ups and fold-ins of the dadaist Tristan Tzar or the Beat-adjacent writers and artists William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin, while more broadly evoking some of the manners and habits of found poetry or constrained writing techniques.
The two cento poems which Wooley ended up with feature across the first two tracks of Henry House, before they are jumbled up and reassembled for each concurrent piece. The record opener ‘Acacia, Burnt Myrrh’ is perhaps the most redolent of its written sources and Wooley’s own sonic influences, as its sine tones and subtly detuned instruments still possess a brassy or reedy character, with a faintly percussive quality of a chafing or winnowing nature as though Wooley were still fingering his trumpet’s valves and slides, beating reeds or pulling out and pushing in organ stops.
The piece develops a haunted and quavering atmosphere before Mat Maneri begins to recite the text, which opens with a caustic juxtaposition and a pungent assault on the senses that pulls directly from ‘A Stimulant for an Old Beast’ or ‘Dream Song 3’:
God bless Henry,
because he won’t get blessings from me.
Only acacia, burnt myrrh, velvet, pricky strings
and the ambient flush of being right.
As the text continues to abound in juxtapositions and summary conclusions which flicker in the moment of their enunciation – with Maneri as the narrator in his amiable yet premonitory baritone suggesting that ‘Maybe Henry was a human being. Perhaps who he was deserves more sifting. I think maybe this is so’ – we begin to get the sense of Henry as a revolving door, both real and unreal and stuck in a rut in the manner of a loop or labyrinth, a composite of dwindling resources and hidebound architectures whose dreams are finally realised ‘but the fulfilment of his dream carried the stale taste of blood’.
When the text describes Maneri as ‘a flawed structure, a house with no walls and no roof and no floor’ there is more than an echo of Franz Kafka’s fragmentary and aphoristic Blue Octavo Notebooks, which open with the now well-known passage:
Everyone carries a room about inside him. This fact can even be proved by means of the sense of hearing. If someone walks fast and one pricks up one’s ears and listens, say in the night, when everything round about is quiet, one hears, for instance, the rattling of a mirror not quite firmly fastened to the wall.
That passage was highlighted by Max Richter as the opening track from The Blue Notebooks all the way back in 2003, now ubiquitous for the straining and yearning strings of ‘On the Nature of Daylight’ which has featured in so many films but suitably clandestine and unnerving upon its release, with Richter subsequently framing the album as a protest against the invasion of Iraq and the ensuing war. Henry House especially on ‘Acacia, Burnt Myrrh’ also evokes the duo of Frank Menchaca and Anar Badalov as Hourloupe, who dispelled the silence of New Orleans crypts and Moorish reflecting pools on Sleepwalker before Three Nights in the Wawayanda offered staggered treatises on ecological balance and cohabitation at the conclusion of a triptych of records which explored time, reality and the natural world.
‘Stump The World I’ manages to conjure some of the same enveloping atmosphere through a quite different sound palette, which is full of croaking frogs and Delphic or Elysian choruses as Megan Schubert recites the second cento text with more of a drawl, calling to mind the Southern Gothic style of Flannery O’Connor or in a musical sphere the Coin Coin series by Matana Roberts, whose Chapter Five: In the Garden turned towards the timely issue of reproductive rights, unspooling the ‘old dusty saga’ of a woman in their ancestral line who died following complications from an illegal abortion through spoken word passages and a soundtrack of free jazz, solo saxophone reflections and Mississippi fife and drum blues.
The closing lines on ‘Stump the World I’ are especially powerful, as after relating the vivid life and eventual rubbing out of a serious man named Happy who ‘passed the plate in church and chewed tobacco’ and ‘had an orchard where he grew a freestone peach named stump the world’, Schubert as the narrator spits out mordantly yet with a jaded restraint:
When I die they can sell privately the little that I leave, at a
discount or without one.
My skin along with the rest.
It is not new;
it is not handsome;
it is not fine;
but still it will be good for some drum or rude tambourine.
As phrases from the rewritten cento poems combine afresh over the remainder of the album, the result is at once more wayward and more robotic, with words and sentences splintering apart and bounding back on themselves. On the third track ‘Clipped Prose of Juncos’ more sustained drones again at times with the demeanour of a pipe organ buttress or intersperse Maneri’s spoken word, both elegiac and hopeful even as his voice sounds more laden by the weight of the world. Those drones with their ringing and amorphous overtones become a shifting, seafaring patchwork which calls to mind some of the recent outcrops by Charlemagne Palestine or FUJ||||||||||TA.
Back with Schubert on ‘Stump The World II’ those high-pitched and sometimes shrill choral patches are more frequent and choppy, punctuating the narrative banshee-like as they string out over a sloshing and sibilant backdrop. And as the tale of Henry House draws to a close, on ‘Aleatory Half Sentences’ submerged bass drones rife with foreboding compete with piano trills, piercing and clangorous before they give way to defter yet eminently shatterable sines as Maneri fulfils his account of desperate yet privileged communion, finally ceding to a slack piano accompaniment which carries the faintest spectre of a rag.
