Nate Wiley

• Genres: Jazz

Biography

A hard-blowing, gritty tenor saxman who has played around Philadelphia since the 1950s, Nate Wiley doesn't consider himself a jazz musician and prefers to call his earthy soul-jazz "liquor-drinking music." But in fact, Wiley is very much a jazz improviser -- although a highly accessible one with strong blues and R&B leanings and a fondess for honkers like Illinois Jacquet, Arnett Cobb and Willis Jackson. Born in South Carolina, Wiley moved to Philly when he was a child and was still living there in his mid-70s. After listening to swing and Dixieland extensively growing up, Wiley was drafted into the army as a young man and spent seven months in Europe during World War II. Home from the war, he studied jazz at three Philly music schools under the GI Bill while paying the bills with day jobs that ranged from being a baggage handler at Philly's 30th Street Station to working in the city's shipyards. It was during the 1950s that Wiley joined organist Joe Whalen's trio, and he remained in that group until Whalen's death from leukemia in 1983. Wiley inherited Whalen's organ and used it in various editions of a group that came to be called Nate Wiley & the Crowd Pleasers, a name Wiley got in 1989, when he read an obituary for tenor titan Arnett Cobb in a musician's union newsletter that described him as "the last of the old-time crowd pleasers." Various Philadelphians passed through Wiley's band in the 1990s -- including Ducky Scott, son of organist/pianist Shirley Scott -- and the Pleasers became a fixture on the Philly jazz scene by headlining Bob & Barbara's (a small jazz bar) every weekend for over a decade. Wiley was 74 when, in early 1998, he entered the studio with Crowd Pleasers Frank McKay (organ) and Cliff Lamar (drums) to record his first album ever. ~ Alex Henderson, Rovi

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