It could be said that Nate Wooley is the Ivo Perelman of the trumpet and Ivo Perelman is the Nate Wooley of the tenor saxophone. If Wooley was playing sax, it’d probably sound a lot like Perelman and likewise if Perelman had picked up a trumpet, it would likely resemble Wooley’s playing. Two instruments, one mind.
So maybe it’s no mystery that they’ve recorded together on at least five separate occasions, most recently, in a trio and another time, in a quartet. With Polarity, it’s just the two, and it seems like that’s a long time coming, because they both thrive as pure improvisers in intimate settings.
And so Ivo Perelman and Nate Wooley convened for a sessions that produced ten, distinct improvisations. With only one person with whom to interact, each regard this tete-a-tete as a whole different ball game than their prior meetings, and they go for it.
“Four” is not the Miles Davis song, and Wooley’s trumpet could hardly be any difference from that from the Prince of Darkness. Both he and Perelman shoot out the gate engaging in an animated conversation that’s full of gumption and wit, always perfectly reading each other’s vibe.
The notes come out so labored on “Two B,” you can almost hear the sweat oozing from them. By the end of the performance though, the sentiment is one of peace. On “Seven A” and elsewhere, Wooley shows off his flair for pushing what’s possible with a trumpet to its limits, much as Perelman does with his tenor sax.
Perelman and Wooley turn inward for “Three A,” a fragile and introspective tune that relies on the players’ ability to turn notes into vehicles for nuanced emotion and that’s just what these cats do. “Five A” feels like an adrenaline rush as they chase each other across a vast tonal field.
On tunes like “Eight” it’s hard to tell the usually dissimilar sax and trumpet apart, they are so locked into the same plane. This is the case even when Perelman ends up singing in the same free manner that he plays his horn. Wooley’s plunged brass is a changed in approach that he uses for “Two A” and even here he deploys it in uncommon ways in order to stay connected with Perelman. Wooley wields the plunger again for “Nine Short” as Perelman’s human-like elocution on sax has him ‘speaking’ in the same dialect.
Wooley and Perelman mostly keep their duologues short and concise, many running only about two minutes, but the ten-minute-plus “Six” is an opportunity to fully unwind ideas imagined on the fly. They use this time converging and diverging again, following along a melodic line that they themselves don’t know about in advance.
Polarity is going to drop February 12, 2021 from Burning Ambulance Music.
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- Dave Douglas, feat. James Brandon Lewis – ‘Gifts’ (2024) - April 11, 2024
