Nate Wooley & Mazen Kerbaj

Two of the most exciting innovators of the trumpet, Nate Wooley and Mazen Kerbaj perform solo and duo at a performance organized by ISSUE Project Room in September 2012.

Nate Wooley’s solo playing has often been cited as being a part of an international revolution in improvised trumpet. Along with Peter Evans and Greg Kelley, Wooley is considered one of the leading lights of the American movement to redefine the physical boundaries of the horn. A combination of vocalization, extreme extended technique, noise and drone aesthetics, amplification and feedback, and compositional rigor, Wooley has been called “an iconoclastic trumpeter” (Time Out NY), and "one of the most interesting and unusual trumpet players living today...without hyperbole” (Dave Douglas).


Mazen Kerbaj is many things: a musician, a producer of comic books, a visual artist, a voice for Lebanese music, and a proponent of the fleeting nature of live and improvised music. He came to international attention in the last ten years through his founding of the Irtijal Festival in Beirut, which was followed by the record label, Al Maslakh and now Johnny Kafta’s Kids Menu, which features music by Lebanese musicians almost exclusively. Leading the charge to re-shape world improvisational language. Kerbaj’s own trumpet playing holds its own special place within the current improvisational practices on the instrument. He sidesteps the two predominant branches of practice of the new generation, those of virtuosity and anti-virtuosity, and finds a third path in which the horn truly becomes alien, speaking a language of its own.

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