The mad, scrambling lifestyle of the improvising musician tends to produce fleeting musical relationships, ad hoc combinations which merely meet expectations, and then are seldom repeated. For four years, Reuben Radding, Nate Wooley, and Mary Halvorson, have cultivated a musical and personal friendship that goes way beyond this business-as-usual approach to free music-making. Their sound is a collision of angular melodies, noise, minimalist textures, and jazz-based interplay which mysteriously becomes much more than a sum of these parts due to the group's willingness to dig deep below the surface.
Mary Halvorson is a guitarist, composer and improviser living in Brooklyn. Since 2000 she has been performing regularly in New York with various groups and has toured Europe and the U.S. with the Anthony Braxton Quintet (Live at the Royal Festival Hall, Leo Records) and Trevor Dunn’s Trio-Convulsant (Sister Phantom Owl Fish, Ipecac Recordings). She has also performed alongside Joe Morris, Nels Cline, John Tchicai, Elliott Sharp, Lee Ranaldo, Andrea Parkins, Marc Ribot, Tony Malaby, Oscar Noriega and John Hollenbeck. Current projects which Mary composes for and performs with include a chamber-music duo with violist Jessica Pavone (Prairies, Lucky Kitchen, 2005); The Mary Halvorson Trio with John Hebert and Ches Smith; and the avant-rock band People (People, I & Ear Records, 2005). She also performs regularly in ensembles led by Taylor Ho Bynum, Ted Reichman, Peter Evans, Tatsuya Nakatani, Jason Cady, Matthew Welch, Brian Chase and Curtis Hasselbring.
Reuben Radding, contrabass, came to New York City in 1988 where he studied with with virtuoso bassist Mark Dresser and quickly became a stalwart of the "Downtown" scene, performing with many of the most prominent new jazz musicians of the time, including John Zorn, Elliott Sharp, Anthony Coleman, Andrea Parkins, Dave Douglas, and Marc Ribot, with whom he toured Europe and Canada in 1995. His own recent projects have included the Reuben Radding Trio with vibraphonist Matt Moran, and clarinetist Oscar Noriega, and Fugitive Pieces, an improvising quartet featuring Nate Wooley, Andrew Drury, and Matt Bauder. Radding and Wooley are also members of the group Transit whose CD was released in 2005 by Portugal's Clean Feed label. Frequent collaborators include pianist Ursel Schlicht (einstein's dreams, Konnex, 2005), saxophonist Jack Wright (This Is Not An Exit, CD-R, Sachimay Interventions, 2006), Texan trombonist Brian Allen (TromboneContrabass, Braintone, 2005), and an improvised chamber trio with Bay-Area violist Tara Flandreau and North Carolina oboeist Carrie Shull (The Branch Will Not Break, Umbrella Recordings, 2005). He is also a member of the Denman Maroney Quintet, Matt Bauder's Paper Gardens, MAP (with Mary Halvorson and Tatsuya Nakatani), and has performed or recorded with Wally Shoup, Wade Matthews, Robert Dick, John Hollenbeck, Lukas Ligeti, Jane Rigler, Saadet Turkoz, Carlo Actis Dato, Steve Beresford, Wolfgang Fuchs, John Oswald, Dylan VanDerSchyff, Stuart Dempster, Ned Rothenberg, Eyvind Kang, Billy Martin, Scott Rosenberg, Butch Morris, Carlos Bechegas, and Leandro Barzabal.
Nate Wooley (b. 1974) grew up in Clatskanie, Oregon, a finnish-american fishing and timber town. Nate’s trumpet playing is considered an organic mixture of new music, free jazz, and noise improvisation traditions. In the context of trumpet improvisation, he has worked diligently to keep one musical foot firmly planted outside of the recognized lineage. Nate currently resides in Jersey City, NJ and performs solo trumpet improvisations as well as with his trio Blue Collar with Steve Swell and Tatsuya Nakatani. He has also performed with Anthony Braxton, Paul Lytton, John Butcher, Alessandro Bosetti, Fred Lonberg-Holm, Joe Morris, Cor Fuhler, Andrea Neumann, Chris Forsyth, Randy Peterson, Tim Barnes, Okkyung Lee, Steve Beresford, Veryan Weston, and other improvisation luminaries.Besides two cds of Blue Collar’s music (a third, live recording, on the way from Firehouse 12 Records this fall), Nate has a solo cd from Creative Sources Recordings (wrong shape to be a storyteller), and is a featured sideman on 25 recordings to date (including Daniel Levin’s “Some Trees†on Hat Art, Reuben Radding’s “Fugitive Pieces†on Pine Ear, and “Transit†on Clean Feed Recordings)
