American trumpeter Nate Wooley was born into the craft - playing in his dad’s big band from the tender age of 13 and soloing with the New York Philharmonic before hitting thirty. But far from being bound by tradition, he has dedicated his career to pushing the boundaries of instrumentation alongside the cream of the avant-garde. And that’s not all, he also likes to write, so it’s only natural that the two pursuits collide from time to time as we find on Henry House.

For Wooley, the early years playing with his dad sealed his musical fate as he went on to study jazz and classical trumpet at the Universities of Denver and Oregon before settling in New York. There he found himself a place in the burgeoning Brooklyn jazz, improv, noise, and new music scenes performing with the very best including John Zorn, Anthony Braxton and Evan Parker, as well as being part of Eliane Radigue’s OCCAM ensemble. As a dedicated improviser, many of his live performances have found their way onto record including the Seven Storey series featuring a collective that included C. Spencer Yuh and Colin Stetson but while the trumpet remains the centre of his musical universe, Wooley has also demonstrated a fascination for the human voice - Experiment for Untrained Voice was released in 2022 while Four Experiments went deep into the narrative – and now takes centre stage.

 Henry’s House gives precedence to Wooley’s poetry. That’s not to say that music isn’t a key part of the whole experience, but this five-part song cycle revolves around two pieces of narrative. Not cut-ups exactly, but Wooley has created his “two cento pieces” by taking words from four sources such as John Berryman’s The Dream Songs and piecing them together to create a pseudo-fever dream reminiscent of the Velvet Underground’s ‘The Gift’. There is music of course, gentle lilting electronic, drone-led sine-tone mixed with detuned instruments including vibraphone, brass and piano all of which supports the stories of Henry and Happy narrated by Mat Maneri and Megan Schubert respectively.

The album opens with ‘Acacia Burnt Myth’ and it is the gentlest of beginnings.  A barely perceptible muted note accompanied by electronic chimes – meditative as the vibraphonic sounds drag the listener into a transcendent lull. Then the spoken voice enters. ‘God Bless Henry, because he won’t get blessings from me’. Engaging and intriguing. ‘Stump the World’ is an entirely different affair as Schubert’s voice enters to a background of frogs croaking. ‘Despite his name Happy was a serious man.’ Here, the instrument is a chorus of female voices that veer from the harmonic to the discordant – Ligeti-esque. ‘Clipped Prose of Juncos’ returns to the story of Henry, this time underscored by a brass drone that rarely wavers in intensity, pitch or tempo but channels an eerie vibe, followed by a reworking of ‘Stump the World’ which borrows the same formula of choir and narrative but with a new emphasis. And then we close with ‘Aleatory Half Sentences’, piano at the helm. Calm and melodic; hectic and jarring. An intoxicating journey.