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Nate Wooley’s Blue Collar trio certainly isn’t of the classic variety. Wooley plays trumpet and flugelhorn, Steve Swell is a trombonist, and Tatsuya Nakatani, perhaps the group’s most well known name, is a percussionist of decidedly atypical scope. While Wooley appears to be the group’s leader, Lovely Hazel, however, serves no more as a vehicle for his playing than that of his collaborators. “48/1,” which opens the disc, finds Nakatani eschewing conventional percussion almost completely, using cymbal scrapes and more ambient textures to underpin Swell and Wooley’s drones, sputters, and smacks. Nakatani’s versatility and inventiveness drives much of Lovely Hazel, though he’s rarely at the forefront of a track (“74” finds him absent, or at least almost invisible), the percussionist usually remains the trio’s most magnetic musical personality. Wooley and Swell aren’t slouches, and do show a respectable ability to engage in numerous styles of improvisational conversation, but they simply aren’t as engaging to listen to. There are exceptions, such as in the aforementioned “74,” in which a series of percussive oral maneuvers make up the track, and “48/2,” in which their beautiful drones wash across the foreground in spectacular fashion. Lovely Hazel clocks in at just under an hour, a length that can feel laborious, especially when individual track lengths tread past the six-minute mark. But, it’s not all hard labor, and Blue Collar do strike it rich more than once throughout Lovely Hazel. One just wishes that it happened more often.

Blue Collar at Amazon & Insound