The first installment of the trumpeter’s ecstatic series to be recorded in a studio is its most beautiful, and somehow the most convincing document of the cycle’s in-person grandeur, too.
On an ordinary Saturday evening, back when ordinary meant large rooms full of strangers, I attended the premiere of Nate Wooley’s Seven Storey Mountain VI in Manhattan. It was November 2019, and perhaps appropriately for the latest entry in a song cycle named after the autobiography of a priest, monk, and philosopher, the venue was a church, St. Peter’s Episcopal in Chelsea. Beneath the vaulted ceiling, the crowd hummed with an energy between the echoey hush of a religious space and the anticipatory buzz of a see-and-be-seen cultural event. The Bibles positioned in each pew looked less like texts of an active parish and more like decorations in a hip, aestheticized club. Ira Kaplan from Yo La Tengo sat a few rows in front of me, I was almost certain.
An actual hum began around us, shadowy and doleful. Singers inserted into the audience belted out a choral work from the neighboring benches. “Didn’t they do this when Steve Reich and Arvo Pärt were at The Shed?” I muttered. But the choral music was ideal for the acoustics of a 19th-century cathedral, rising like heat over the Spuyten Duyvil blue stone. Musicians, seated on the pulpit surrounding Wooley’s trumpet like stoics, started to play. Susan Alcorn’s pedal steel accented the vocals. Brushes swirled on a snare drum. The piece that followed was hardly ordinary, and it didn’t aspire to the divine, either. An ecstatic, communal experience in a city seemingly built for them, the debut roused and moved us as our night bled into the wee hours of Sunday.
When my partner and I woke at home the next morning, we could still feel the music, even as its immediate sensory imprint faded. Meanwhile, Wooley and an edited version of his ensemble—which, even in slimmed-down form, consists of 14 musicians, among them contemporary downtown fixtures C. Spencer Yeh, Chris Corsano, and Ava Mendoza—headed to Oktaven Audio in the suburb of Mount Vernon and recorded the previous night’s composition in a single day. The result loses the setting of the sanctuary, but none of the polyphonic fullness that the sacred proportions of a cathedral allow. The proximity of the musicians to the show—the way the church must have continued to ripple through them—makes St. Peter’s Chelsea a player on the incantatory Seven Storey Mountain VI.
On record, Wooley balances the immediacy of his live set with the clarity of a studio session. The keyboard loops that detail the piece’s woozy middle section are audible underneath crash cymbals. Readings from John Berryman’s 77 Dream Songs mumble below droning violin. Lyrics from “Reclaim the Night,” a 1979 Peggy Seeger song that censures sexual violence, conclude the 45-minute, one-track album. At last year’s opening, the references to Adam and Eve sounded ecclesiastical, but Wooley writes in the album booklet, “Religious dogma holds little interest for me.” Instead, the aesthetics and fellowship of Christianity become a vessel for condemning patriarchy’s treatment of women, one of the many fascinating knots in his composition’s skein.
Wooley started the Seven Storey Mountain series in 2007, and each chapter takes the same general shape: Beginning with a spare musical line, the works build into a dissonant freak-out before they flatten again into a gentle melody, drone, or percussion pattern, often mirroring the initial motif. Wooley’s alchemic mix of jazz, minimalism, choral music, indeterminacy, and musique concrète depends on the varied, individual creative processes he implements to guide his musicians: Some read written scores, others follow jazz chord changes, others aleatoric prompts. Stems from previous installments of SSM reappear as time markers and cues. To mesh their playing styles in a single work, the players explore their incompatibilities. Making decisions collectively becomes its own brand of spontaneity, and failure is welcome. “Virtuosity,” Wooley tells us, “is the possibility of total collapse.”
He collapses these diverse methodologies into a philosophy that celebrates writing as a kind of artistic cooperative, which he calls “Mutual Aid Music.” If its components aren’t inherently original, Wooley’s blend of sensibilities is. He dashes his Cageian, improvisatory brew with old-school, pre-modern concerns, treating the acoustics of rooms as active participants in a piece’s creation. Previous entries in SSM were recorded live at Manhattan’s Abrons Art Center and Brooklyn’s Issue Project Room—the former a traditional, balconied theater, the latter a marble-floored, cubic hall designed by legendary architectural firm McKim, Mead & White. Each of these albums is powerful, yet they come with all of the sonic diminishment and experiential FOMO that can attenuate a concert recording. VI is the first installment of Seven Storey Mountain to be recorded in a studio. It’s more beautiful than its predecessors, and somehow the most convincing document of the cycle’s in-person grandeur, too.
Today, live shows increasingly feel like relics of an old social order, and religious congregations, including St. Peter’s Chelsea, are assembling for services digitally. Yet Seven Storey Mountain VI never alludes to communality as something that exists in the outside world. It expresses communality, with all of its potential for the profound and the spiritual. What we search for in crowds of people is complicated, but at the album’s end, Wooley’s chorus of women tells us, “You can’t scare me,” the strength of their numbers turning a “me” into a “we.” Gathering once gave us courage. Wooley’s latest shows us that, even in the isolation of our homes, the glowing residue of a past togetherness can make us feel more resolute than afraid.
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