FOLK MUSIC [NATE WOOLEY/CHRIS CORSANO/CHES SMITH] with BEN OPIE & CHIFFCHAFF TRIO + PATRICK BREINER

Thursday July 3rd 2025

tcrps prsnts

an evening of experimental electro-acoustic music

featuring

FOLK MUSIC TRIO
[NATE WOOLEY - trumpet, amplifier, CHRIS CORSANO - drums, clarinet, feedback, and CHES SMITH - drums, sampler, electronics, percussion]

with

BEN OPIE

and

CHIFFCHAFF TRIO + PATRICK BREINER
[Trē Seguritan Abalos, Ricki Weidenhof, Caleb Gamble]


8pm

$20 at the door /$15 advance
(no one turned away for lack of funds)

21+

Brillobox
4104 Penn Ave.
Pittsburgh, PA 15224


NATE WOOLEY

Hailed as making “… the most progressive campfire music ever” by The New York Times, Nate Wooley has been a quiet force in reshaping contemporary American music. Born in Clatskanie, Oregon, Wooley began playing professionally in his father’s big band at age twelve. He is now an internationally recognized performer, a leading-edge composer, and a champion of the wonderful strangeness of American experimentalism.

As a trumpet player, Wooley has been an important interpreter of
experimental composition, making his premiere as a soloist with The New York Philharmonic in 2019. His For/With series has led to the commissioning, premiere, and documentation of new works for trumpet from composers such as Christian Wolff, Wadada Leo Smith, Sarah Hennies, and others. As an improviser, he has been a part of a movement to redefine the technical possibilities of the instrument. His solo performances have been described as “exquisitely hostile” by Massimo Ricci of Touching Extremes, and he has worked with such iconoclasts as Anthony Braxton, John Zorn, Evan Parker, Annea Lockwood, and Éliane Radigue.

Wooley’s compositions are evolving amalgams of improvisation, folk music, text, and immersive experiences that communicate an arc of human experience from the fragility of being alone to the ecstasy of collectivity. His series of solo works based on the physicality of speech, Syllables, redefined the way the trumpet’s virtuosity if perceived. Much of his composition is collaborative, such as his ecstatic song cycle, Seven Storey Mountain and the ever-evolving Mutual Aid Music compositional ecosystem. Recent work has been dedicated to ecology, documenting the cohabitation of natural features and industrial presence, which then becomes a part of the composition’s polyphony. He has been commissioned by Yarn/Wire, Dither Quartet, and his work has been performed by Apartment House, among other ensembles.

Wooley is also a writer of essays on new music published in The New York Review of Books, The Nation, and E-Flux Journal and others. His writing explores the maverick spirit of American experimentalism as well as shining light on emerging and underheard voices in the international improvised music and composition worlds. To this end, he founded and was the editor-in-chief of Sound American, a print and online music journal making space for musicians to speak in their own words, for ten years. The journal, which had a run of thirty issues, was internationally distributed and remains a critical and community favorite among musicians and music fans.

https://natewooley.wordpress.com/


FOLK MUSIC

Folk Music is Nate Wooley (trumpet, amplifier), Chris Corsano (drums, clarinet, feedback), and Ches Smith (drums, sampler, electronics, percussion)

After years of conceptual and compositional projects, Wooley put
together a trio dedicated simply to free music without boundaries. Why “Folk Music?” The name stems from the idea of making something from scratch using the full life-experience and creativity of the musicians, a story that changes with each re-telling, that progresses each time the musicians come together to tell it again. It is music as legend or myth. Folk songs, strange, but true.

https://natewooley.wordpress.com/folk-music/


CHRIS CORSANO

Chris Corsano (b. 1975, USA) is a New York-based drummer who has been active at the intersections of collective improvisation, free jazz, avant-rock, and experimental music since the late 1990's. He's been the rim-batterer of choice for some of the greatest contemporary purveyors of "jazz" (Joe McPhee, Paul Flaherty, Mette Rasmussen, Zoh Amba) and "rock" (Sir Richard Bishop, Bill Orcutt, Jim O'Rourke), as well as artists beyond categorization (Björk for her Volta album and world tour, Michael Flower, Okkyung Lee).

Corsano began a long-standing, high-energy musical partnership with saxophonist Paul Flaherty in 1998. Their style, which they
occasionally refer to with (semi-)tongue-in-cheek humor as "The Hated Music", combines modern free-jazz's ecstatic collectivism with the urgency and intensity of hardcore punk. A move from western Massachusetts to the UK in 2005 led Corsano to develop his solo music -- a dynamic, spontaneously-composed orchestra-of-one utilizing extended techniques for drum set, non-percussive instruments of his own creation (e.g. bowed violin strings stretched across drum heads), circular breathing on modified reed instruments, and stockpiles of resonant metals. He spent 2007-08 as the drummer on Björk's Volta world tour, all the while weaving in shows and recordings on his days off with the likes of Evan Parker, Michael Flower, and Jandek. He moved back to the U.S. in 2009 and continued touring in an ultrawide array of ever-evolving collaborations. In 2017 he won the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award. A renowned solo performer in his own right, Corsano has a new solo record, The Key (Became The Important Thing [and Then Just Faded Away] out on the Drag City label.

His dedication to collective improvisation has led to Corsano to join forces with many kindred spirits and his appearance on over 180 records and thousands of live performances. He's worked with, among others: Paul Dunmall (released by the label: ESP-Disk), Joe McPhee (Roaratorio), Okkyung Lee (Open Mouth), Bill Orcutt (Palilalia), Mette Rasmussen (Hot Cars Warp Records & Clean Feed), John Edwards (OTOroku & Dancing Wayang), Sylvie Courvoisier (Relative Pitch), Nate Wooley (No Business & Astral Spirits), Jim O'Rourke & Akira Sakata (Drag City & Polystar), Merzbow (Family Vineyard), Jessica Rylan (Load Records), Rodrigo Amado (Trost), Nels Cline (Strange Attractors), Heather Leigh (Volcanic Tongue), Ghédalia Tazartès (Ultra Eczema), Ken Vandermark (Audiographic), and Sunburned Hand Of Man (Manhand).

https://www.cor-sano.com/


CHES SMITH

Originally from Sacramento, California, Ches Smith is a drummer,
percussionist, and composer based in New York. He has collaborated with a host of artists on many scenes since the early 2000s, including Marc Ribot, Tim Berne, John Zorn, Darius Jones, David Torn, John Tchicai, Nels Cline, Mary Halvorson, Trevor Dunn, Terry Riley, Kris Davis, Dave Holland, Secret Chiefs 3, Xiu Xiu, Good for Cows, Theory of Ruin, and Mr. Bungle, among others.

He has nine records to his name as a bandleader that feature his
writing and ensemble curation, and is a devout student of Haitian
Vodou drums, performing in religious and folkloric contexts in New
York and Haiti for the last decade.

https://www.chessmith.com/

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