OFFICIAL PRESS RELEASE

Audiographic Records and Pleasure of the Text are pleased to announce the dual release of the debut record of the Ken Vandermark/Nate Wooley duo, entitled East By Northwest. The record was released on December 20, 2014 and is the culmination of a year of performances throughout the US. East By Northwest was recorded live at Okka Fest in Milwaukee in 2014 and captures the duo’s fire and freewheeling approach to the often overlooked duo pairing of reeds and brass. The CD is available through http://catalyticsound.com/ and http://natewooley.com/pottr.

Chicago saxophonist and composer Ken Vandermark, and New York trumpet stalwart Nate Wooley, have been operating in each other’s orbits for the past five years. For this project, they work with each other’s iconoclastic compositional and improvisational vocabularies.  Taking their cues from the underappreciated work of John Carter and Bobby Bradford, Vandermark and Wooley work together to create an organic combination of jazz tradition, free improvisation, and modern composition in this new raw and intimate duo.

A fixture on the Chicago-area music scene since the 1990s, Ken Vandermark has earned wide critical praise for his playing and his multilayered compositions, which typically balance intricate orchestration with passionate improvisation. He has led or been a member of many groups, has collaborated with many other musicians, and was awarded a 1999 MacArthur Fellowship. He plays tenor saxophone, clarinet, bass clarinet and baritone saxophone.

Nate Wooley’s solo playing has often been cited as being a part of an international revolution in improvised trumpet. In the past three years, Wooley has been gathering international acclaim for his idiosyncratic trumpet language.  Time Out New York has called him “an iconoclastic trumpeter”, and Downbeat’s Jazz Musician of the Year, Dave Douglas has said, “Nate Wooley is one of the most interesting and unusual trumpet players living today, and that is without hyperbole”.