Mutual Aid Music is a compositional system devised by Nate Wooley as a way of shocking improvisers and listeners out of their habits. Over the last ten years, beginning with the quartet Battle Pieces the system and the band has grown to its present state, with twenty performers worldwide and a compositional “book” of over one hundred microcompositions. 

In practice, each musician uses one of these microcompositions as the base material to create an ever-evolving ensemble music. One or two performers improvise without material, using their lack of compositional constraints to weave connections between the other players, all of whom are trying to find a way to manipulate their material to create something fresh and original as a group. It is music in which each person is asked to perform within the mission of musical mutual aid: giving their sound to the group with the goal of building a musical statement–and language–that transcends the individual, strong personalities that make up the ensemble.

Nate Wooley trumpet
Russell Greenberg percussion
Matt Moran vibraphone
Madison Greenstone clarinets
gabby fluke-mogul violin
Joshua Modney violin
Mariel Roberts cello
Luke Stewart bass

A livestream will be available free of charge at 8pm on the day of the performance and archived for future viewing. Watch below or on YouTube.

Mutual Aid Music has been growing from its initial quartet form since 2014. Begun as a commission from Anthony Braxton’s Tricentric Foundation, the compositional experiment was designed by the group’s founder, Nate Wooley, to confound the habits of improvisers, and to challenge the perception of what jazz could sound like. Ten years and four releases later, the group has evolved to include twenty performers from the US and Europe, and the compositional system has grown and developed into a musical language that is specific to Mutual Aid Music in whatever grouping that evening’s concert takes.

In 2023, Mutual Aid Music became the house band for the Assembly series at Sisters in Brooklyn. Once a month, whomever could make it for one set would come and take part in a public experimentation with the compositional system, allowing the relationships between the musicians and the music to grow deeper in front of an audience. In September of 2023, this expanded form of the group will release Four Experiments, a box set of new material written for the group by its founder.