Henry House is an unexpected offering in the fascinating discography of American trumpeter-composer-improviser Nate Wooley. It is Wooley’s first long-form composition that doesn’t feature his trumpet playing, and the first to be constructed around his poetic writing. But Wooley, the ever, fearless and resourceful, thought-provoking and poetic musician borrows here compositional ideas and texts from American poet John Berryman’s The Dream Songs (1969), German biographer of Franz Kafka Reiner Stach’s Kafka: The Decisive Years (2005), American writer Joseph Mitchell’s The Bottom of the Harbor (1951) and American poet-essayist Wendell Berry’s collection of essays The Long-Legged House (1969).
Wooley took fragments of these texts and weaved a strange funeral mass after a long and tasking process. The texts were changed and erased, rewritten, and restructured
