LIVE FROM TROUTMAN

YARn/wire studio, Ridgewood, Queens

AUGUST 21, 7:00 PM

Our popular FREE studio shows are back for the 2026-27 season!

First up, come get a closer look at Nate Wooley’s starkly beautiful work After Nan Shepard, featuring the composer on trumpet and two incredible guest vocalists: Joan La Barbara and Tara Khozein.

Like many of our studio performances, you won't have a typical concert experience, but something more intimate and meaningful...

Nate Wooley’s music grows out of the spontaneity of jazz and improvised music, always with some room for necessary growth, and always in hopes that a single piece will evolve over years of playing it in new ways. After Nan Shepherd is no exception: after its world premiere in Brooklyn in January with Joan LaBarbara in the part of Nan and its subsequent European premiere with Tara Khozein in the part, it became clear that Nan Shepherd, as she presents herself in The Living Mountain is more complex than the single, solo voice that Wooley wrote in his score. Nan Shepherd was part Joan LaBarbara and part Tara Khozein. And so, as the group prepares to go into the studio to record the piece, they are learning what this new version of the piece—with two voices!—feels like. To that end, Wooley suggested that the intimate performance we had planned for Friday night become something more fluid, an open rehearsal in which the audience gets to see the negotiations, missteps, epiphanies, and preparations of a piece going into the studio to be documented for the first time. The piece will not be performed as a whole, but the audience will hear versions of each movement that may never occur in public or on record again.

After Nan Shepherd explores tensions between improvisation and composition, modern and ancient expression, history and memory. Following inspiration from Scottish poet Anna “Nan” Shepherd’s repeated trips into the Cairngorm Mountains—as documented in her groundbreaking book, The Living Mountain—the piece takes four themes and slowly unravels them first, by using traditional methods of compositional variation, and then through increasing amounts of performer agency. This movement from composition to improvisation expands upon other pieces by Wooley, such as Mutual Aid Music and Four Experiments, and pays homage to historical movements in improvisation and indeterminacy in the grand tradition of American experimentalism.