A Silence Opens is the third, and unfortunately, the last album of the Columbia Icefield, the quartet that trumpeter Nate Wooley founded, and featuring pedal steel master Susan Alcorn, guitarist-vocalist Ava Mandoza, and drummer Ryan Sawyer. A Silence Opens is informed by the death of close ones and the endless grief their death entails, and began as a tribute to the trumpeter Ron Miles (who passed away in March 2022), Wooley's mentor and someone he looked up to as an older brother, credited for saving Wooley’s life and making him a better person, expanded to a memorial album for Alcorn, whose idiosyncratic sound distinguished the quartet’s sound, who passed away in January 2025, while Columbia Icefield completed the album.
Wooley writes: “Death is a lack with weight. At the moment that you realize that someone you love is irrecoverably gone, a small tear in your life opens up. As days go by, the sliver of grief grows, becoming a rift, a gap, a gulley, a canyon. At the point that you feel lost in the immensity of space where that person used to be, the expansion stops; the hole—the vast and airy part of your life that used to be occupied by that person—becomes solid. Maybe it decreases in size, but more likely, your memories grow to occupy its space”.
Wooley decided to transform the “pressure with sadness” and fill the silence and the vacuum that death brings with new sounds and new voices, creating a deeply emotional and life-affirming musical statement. The album includes three Miles’ pieces, and Alcorn’s favorite protest song - Chilean singer-songwriter Víctor Jara’s “El Derecho De Vivir En Paz” (The Right to Live in Peace, the song that closes Alcorn’s Canto album, Relative Pitch, 2023). The third, unrehearsed interpretation of this song featured a choir of Alcorn’s friends - Mary Halvorson, Ingrid Laubrock, Wendy Eisenberg, gabby fluke-mogul, Laura Ortman, Patrick Holmes, with Wooley, Mandoza, and Sawyer. “We just felt the joy—in saying thank you, we love you, and goodbye—that Susan would have taken in seeing friends and bandmates all lined up, eyes closed, following the lines of a melody she felt in her heart”, Wooley says.
A Silence Opens immediately occupies your full attention with its powerful emotional urgency, faithfully capturing the complex musical essence and personas of Miles and Alcorn. It is structured as a mournful suite or ritual that celebrates the lives and the gift of knowing Miles and Alcorn. It begins with Wooley’s vulnerable whistling solo, the melody of “El Derecho De Vivir En Paz”, followed by Miles’ ballad “Howard Beach” (from My Cruel Heart, Gramavision, 1996), with Mendoza contrasting and pushing Wooley’s touching and soulful playing into aggressive storms; then Mendoza, who almost cries as she recites “El Derecho”; Miles’ dramatic “Darken My Door” (from I Am a Man, Yellowbird, 2017); the choir who “El Derecho” in a waythat makes you want to join their singing; Wooley’s poetic centerpiece, “We Say Goodbye Twice/Wildwood Flower”, that distills the musical and emotional core of this inspiring, heartfelt album with Alcorn’s arresting playing; the quartet offering a joyful interpertation of “El Derecho””; an intense and urgent, distortion-heavy and propulsive version of Miles “You Taste” (from Woman’s Day, Gramavision, 1997); and concluding with Wooley’s solo trumpet of “El Derecho”, simultaneously singing and crying this song, and then whistles it, marking a final acceptance of the passed one, and also as a requiem for Columbia Icefield itself, until it disappears in silence.
Columbia Icefield was in many ways a kind of musical family, and it sounds like a close-knit musical organism. It was one of those few, rare bands that keep expanding its musical universe with every new album, a band that you cherish all its albums, a band that is larger than its parts. “May we always bear the weight of these losses as a gift of presence and memory,” Wooley concluded.
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