Nate Wooley Sextet - (Sit in) The Throne of Friendship (2013)

Nate Wooley isn’t only a great trumpeter, one of the very best around. He’s also a musician of projects, a conceptualist, a composer, a bandleader. And the Nate Wooley Sextet is his brass band of sorts. “Of sorts” because, as everything else in his music, its instrumental setup isn’t the ordinary: an association of trumpet, bass clarinet doubling with baritone saxophone (Josh Sinton) and tuba (Dan Peck) results in something very far from all the established patterns for this kind of configuration. You can’t have a fanfare with this formula. Or can you? Well, there’s also a vibraphone (Matt Moran) to complicate things, and a “normal” rhythm section (bassist Eivind Opsvik and drummer Harris Eisenstadt) keeps the group still.