Nate Wiley

A hard-blowing, gritty tenor saxman that has played around Philadelphia because the 1950s, Nate Wiley doesn’t consider himself a jazz musician and prefers to contact his earthy soul-jazz “liquor-drinking music.” However in reality, Wiley is very much indeed a jazz improviser — although an extremely available one with solid blues and R&B leanings and a fondess for honkers like Illinois Jacquet, Arnett Cobb and Willis Jackson. Blessed in SC, Wiley transferred to Philly when he was a kid and was still living there in his middle-70s. After hearing golf swing and Dixieland thoroughly developing up, Wiley was drafted in to the military as a guy and spent seven a few months in European countries during World Battle II. Home in the war, he examined jazz at three Philly music academic institutions beneath the GI Costs while having to pay the expenses with day careers that ranged from being truly a baggage handler at Philly’s 30th Road Station to employed in the city’s shipyards. It had been through the 1950s that Wiley became a member of organist Joe Whalen’s trio, and he continued to be for the reason that group until Whalen’s loss of life from leukemia in 1983. Wiley inherited Whalen’s body organ and utilized it in a variety of editions of an organization that had become known as Nate Wiley & the Audience Pleasers, a name Wiley got in 1989, when he browse an obituary for tenor titan Arnett Cobb within a musician’s union publication that defined him as “the final from the old-time audience pleasers.” Several Philadelphians handed down through Wiley’s music group in the 1990s — including Ducky Scott, kid of organist/pianist Shirley Scott — as well as the Pleasers became a fixture in the Philly jazz picture by headlining Bob & Barbara’s (a little jazz pub) every weekend for over ten years. Wiley was 74 when, in early 1998, he came into the studio room with Masses Pleasers Frank McKay (body organ) and Cliff Lamar (drums) to record his 1st album ever.