If you grew up on Clifford Brown (1954) records and think you know what a trumpet can sound like, Nate Wooley will mess with your expectations fast. He can play gorgeous, clean lines when he wants to, but a lot of his music lives in the space before or after a conventional note — breath noise, valve clicks, tones that crack and squeal, long stretches where you're not sure if you're hearing a horn or a radiator. He grew up in small-town Oregon, the son of a working trumpet player, and ended up in New York in the early 2000s right as the downtown improvised music scene was figuring out how far an instrument could be pushed without breaking.

What makes him interesting isn't just the extended technique, though — plenty of players can make weird noises on a horn. It's that Wooley uses those sounds structurally, the way a composer might use harmony. His long-running series Seven Storey Mountain, which grew from a solo piece into a sprawling large-ensemble project, builds entire pieces out of drone, noise, and slow accumulation rather than melody and solos. It's patient music, sometimes punishing, often beautiful if you give it room.

He's also just a really good collaborator, which matters in a scene built on trust. His duo and trio work with Mary Halvorson is some of the most interesting guitar-and-horn conversation happening in improvised music, and his album Columbia Icefield (2019), with Halvorson, pedal steel player Susan Alcorn, and drummer Ryan Sawyer, is a good entry point — it has actual songs, a kind of warped Americana quality, and still leaves plenty of room for Wooley to get strange. He's worked with Anthony Braxton for years, played free jazz with Ken Vandermark, and made records that honor older figures like Bill Dixon on (Dance to) The Early Music (2015), a quiet, patient tribute that shows how much Wooley absorbed from Dixon's less-is-more approach to the horn.

On top of playing, Wooley founded and edited Sound American, a journal built around deep dives into specific musical ideas rather than reviews or profiles — which tells you something about how his brain works. He's not chasing novelty for its own sake. He's genuinely curious about what sound is and what a trumpet is for, and he's spent a career asking that question out loud, on record, in front of people. If you want jazz that's tuneful and comfortable, this isn't your guy. If you want to hear someone rebuild an instrument from the inside, start here.