Wadada Leo Smith (b. December 18, 1941): Legendary, highly versatile, and innovative musician, composer, arranger, orchestrator, conductor, ensemble leader, music theorist, philosopher, and teacher

SOUND PROJECTIONS

AN ONLINE QUARTERLY MUSIC MAGAZINE

EDITOR:  KOFI  NATAMBU

  WINTER, 2016

  VOLUME TWO           NUMBER THREE

 

WAYNE SHORTER

 

'Featuring the Musics and Aesthetic Visions of: 

LEO SMITH
March 26-April 1

AHMAD JAMAL
April 2-8

DIONNE WARWICK
April 9-15

LEE MORGAN
April 16-22

BILL DIXON
April 23-29

SAM COOKE
April 30-May 6

MUHAL RICHARD ABRAMS
May 7-13

BILLY HARPER
May 14-20

SISTER ROSETTA THARPE
May 21-27

QUINCY JONES
May 28-June 3

BESSIE SMITH
June 4-10

ROBERT JOHNSON
June 11-17

 

http://www.wadadaleosmith.com/pages/bio.html

ISHMAEL WADADA LEO SMITH: trumpeter and multi-instrumentalist, composer and improviser has been active in creative contemporary music for over forty years. His systemic music language Ankhrasmation is significant in his development as an artist and educator. 

Born in Leland, Mississippi, Smith's early musical life began in the high school concert and marching bands. At the age of thirteen, he became involved with the Delta Blues and Improvisation music traditions. He received his formal musical education with his stepfather Alex Wallace, the U.S. Military band program (1963), Sherwood School of Music (1967-69), and Wesleyan University (1975-76). Mr. Smith has studied a variety of music cultures: African, Japanese, Indonesian, European and American. 

He has taught at the University of New Haven (1975-'76), the Creative Music Studio in Woodstock, NY (1975-'78), and Bard College (1987-'93). He is currently a faculty member at The Herb Alpert School of Music at California Institute of the Arts.   He is the director of the African-American Improvisational Music program, and is a member of ASCAP, Chamber Music America, and the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. 

Mr. Smith's awards and commissions include: MAP Fund Award for “Ten Freedom Summers” (2011), Chamber Music America New Works Grant (2010), NEA Recording Grant (2010), Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (2009-2010), Other Minds residency and "Taif", a string quartet commission (2008), Fellow of the Jurassic Foundation (2008), FONT(Festival of New Trumpet) Award of Recognition (2008), Jazz Journalists Association Jazz Award (2005), Islamic World Arts Initiative of Arts International (2004), Fellow of the Civitela Foundation (2003), Fellow at the Atlantic Center for the Arts (2001), "Third Culture Copenhagen" in Denmark-presented a paper on Ankhrasmation (1996), Meet the Composer/Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Commissioning Program (1996), Asian Cultural Council Grantee to Japan (June-August 1993), Meet the Composer/Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Commissioning Program (1990), New York Foundation on the Arts Fellowship in Music (1990), Numerous Meet the Composer Grants (since 1977), and National Endowment for the Arts Music Grants (1972, 1974, 1981). 

Mr. Smith's music philosophy Notes (8 Pieces) Source a New. World Music: Creative Music has been published by Kiom Press (1973), translated and published in Japan by Zen-On Music Company Ltd. (1976). In 1981 Notes was translated into Italian and published by Nistri-Litschi Editori. 

He was invited to a conference of artists, scientists and philosophers "Third Culture Copenhagen" in Denmark 1996, and presented a paper on his Ankhrasmation music theory and notational system for creative musicians. His interview was recorded for Denmark T.V., broadcasted September 1996. 

Some of the artists Mr. Smith has performed with are : Muhal Richard Abrams, Anthony Braxton, Leroy Jenkins, Roscoe Mitchell, Lester Bowie, Richard Teitelbaum, Joseph Jarman, George Lewis, Cecil Taylor, Andrew Cyrill, Oliver Lake, Anthony Davis, Carla Bley, David Murray, Don Cherry, Jeanne Lee, Milton Campbell, Henry Brant, Richard Davis, Tadao Sawai, Ed Blackwell, Sabu Toyozumi, Peter Kowald, Kazuko Shiraishi, Han Bennink, Misja Mengelberg, Marion Brown, Kazutoki Umezu, Kosei Yamamoto, Charlie Haden, Kang Tae Hwan, Kim Dae Hwan, Tom Buckner, Malachi Favors Magoustous and Jack Dejohnette among many others. 

Mr. Smith currently has three ensembles: Golden Quartet, Silver Orchestra, and Organic.   His compositions have also been performed by other contemporary music ensembles: AACM-Orchestra, Kronos Quartet, Da Capo Chamber Player, New Century Players, San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, Contemporary Chamber Players (University of Chicago), S.E.M. Ensemble, Southwest Chamber Music, Del Sol String Quartet, New York New Music Ensemble, ne(x)tworks, and California E.A.R. Unit. 

Mr. Smith's music for multi-ensembles has been performed since 1969. "Tabligh" for double-ensemble was performed by Golden Quartet and Classical Persian ensemble at Merkin Concert Hall (2006) and by Golden Quartet and Suleyman Erguner's Classical Turkish ensemble at Akbank Music Festival in Istanbul (2007). His largest work "Odwira" for 12 multi-ensembles (52 instrumentalists) was performed at California Institute of the Arts (March 1995). His Noh piece "Heart Reflections" was performed in Merkin Concert Hall, NY (November 1996).

© 1997-2011 Ishmael Wadada Leo Smith

 

http://www.wadadaleosmith.com/pages/interviews_eng_3.html#profile 

 

PROFILE: LEO SMITH
by Bob Ness
Downbeat Magazine 10 . 7. 76 

 

At 35 Leo Smith is a trumpeter and composer who has been at the fore front of the New Creative music since 1967 when he joined forces with the influential and historically important AACM in Chicago. Early associations there with Muhal Richard Abrams, Leroy Jenkins,and Anthony Braxton have produced a number of recordings as well as those under his own leadership with his New Delta Ahkri ensemble. Currently, he is part of the new Anthony Braxton quartet, along with Dave Holland and Philip Wilson.

Smith is also the author of a small but dense book/pamphlet pointing towards a further comprehension of the music he and his colleagues create entitled Notes (8 Pieces) Source A New World Music: Creative Music. Published in 1973. and dedicated to "the pioneers of creative music in America ... [who liberated the performer to a creativity of direct deliverance of a creative thought: music."

The book's contents, Smith emphasizes, "are very important to me in terms of my concepts and ambitions." In it he equates creative music with improvisation, meaning "that the Music is created at the moment it is performed, whether it is developing a given theme or is improvisation on a given rhythm or sound (Structures) or, in the purest form. when the improviser creates without any of these conditions, but creates at that moment. through his or her wit and imagination, an arrangement of silence and sound and rhythm that has never before been heard and will never again be heard."

This kind of meandering and closely argued thought is also found in Smith's conversation and it's delivered in a soft-spoken, almost down-home voice which always sounds very calm - almost sleepy. He lives in West Haven. Conn., an easy drive to the Eastern Music centers. but he grew up in a small country town called Leland. Miss. His stepfather was a blues man who played guitar. piano, drums, and sang throughout the Midwest and deep south. He can remember men like Little Milton, Elmore James. B. B. King and many other blues men of the Mississippi Delta region coming over to visit and to play in his family's living room.

There was also the radio. "In Leland. I used to listen to the radio and hear ail kinds of music - Harry James, Benny Goodman. and some fantastic pieces by Louis Armstrong who was always Spoken of as the greatest trumpet player in the world. I imagine that subconsciously played a strong part in my attraction towards the trumpet, but essentially I'm attracted to Music. It doesn't matter that much whether I play the trumpet or whatever, although I do love the sound of the trumpet and I know thoroughly the whole trumpet dynasty.

"I'm attracted to music and to being able to create ideas to use to influence physical. spiritual, and psychic changes, as well as materialistic changes in the lives of those I know and those I may never see. I want to be able to channel music back towards the tradition of the musician (which is what John Coltrane. Albert Ayler, the AACM, and others were about) as somebody who didn't just play an instrument and send out notes in a relationship called art. I want to get back to the first tradition of the creative musician. which was to be able to perform, heal, be a spokesman and leader in the community and to be able to channel ideas of influence over great distances and not be so centered on 'himself' and 'success'.

During junior high school Smith moved from mellophone to French horn to trumpet and he played in marching bands ("One of the strongest things I remember of the marching bands in the south is that they would play the marches as written and then improvise on them."), concert stage bands, and an 8-1 0 piece creative orchestra which played dance tunes, some original material, and a lot of Ellington pieces such as Mood Indigo, Take The A Train, and Jeep's Blues.

After high school. Smith traveled for about a year with groups playing blues, r&b, and soul music. He then went into the army for five years (he took a short discharge in order to get to Europe) and played in post bands in the south and in Italy and France, and was exposed to musicians from different backgrounds. He feels that the army experience was worth it ("even though I couldn't wait to get out from the first day I was in") because it gave him a chance to play every day and. "you had the time to sit and work on things, which is very important."

Just before he g of out of the army in 1966 a Sax player gave him Anthony Braxton's phone number in Chicago. Smith called him as soon as he got there in January. 1967 and eventually became part of the AACM, which is now in its 11th year and what Smith calls its third period.

"The AACM is one of the most thorough organizations in the world. I feet that it will be looked upon as one of the cornerstones of its type by future generations. So many people came together with so many different ideas and didn't feel threatened or inhibited, or felt they would be robbed of their ideas. It also operated at a very high learning level. The AACM, for us, was like an open forum and it gave everyone a chance to work in the solo a form, ensemble form, and orchestral form, and to develop these areas simultaneously. A very wide spectrum of creative energy was happening there.We had painting exhibits,theater, dance, poetry, plays, critical interpretations of the music, and historical surveys of certain periods within the music.'

When Smith first came into the AACM, he Put together a trio with Braxton and Leroy Jenkins which was the basis for an ensemble that existed from late 1967 until early 1970. The association culminated in New York with Muse recordings under thegroup name, Creative Construction Company, and included Muhal Richard Abrams, Richard Davis,and Steve McCall.  Their music was not always easily accepted and Smith remembers the big Belgian Festival during the summer of 1969 when the people "booed and threw chunks of mud and pop bottles on us. And our very last live performanceas the CCC in Paris in January of 1970 was a riot. It began during the first set and during the intermission the intensity increased so that when we came out to play the second set they cut us off and wouldn't let us play."

After the breakup of the CCC, Smith formed a group called Integral (with Henry Threadgill, Thurman Barker, and Lester Lashley) that lasted about six months and then he moved to Connecticut. "In late l970, I organized a group called the New Dalta Ahkri ('Ahkri' is a word representing a perfect union) and the idea behind it was to create music of totally different orders and to have these centers of activity fluctuate in terms of involvement, intensity, and contribution"

The group has gone through a few personnel changes and now includes Anthony Davis on piano, Wes Brown on bass and flute,their album Reflectivity is on Kabell), and in March of l975 saxophonist Oliver Lake became part of the group when he's not with his own ensemble. Percussionist Paul Maddox recently joined them to make it a quintet.'Every member of the group contributes in an entirely different way from each other, and this is true to an extreme.

Smith has mixed feelings about New York and living on the east coast. "New York actually refers not just to New York city but to the whole north-eastern circle.In a place of such commerciality there is a.lot of creative players and great musicianship, but I sometimes feel that they expose themselves in a mastership of craft rather than creatively. I think it's a good place to play and almost all of the great ideas occurred there, but the players, with a few exceptions, were not born there. The beautiful thing about living in the east is that you get credit for what you do and you get paid. In the Midwest and west you can play a lot but you're considered 'local.' That puts a vibration on the listener, the public, and they don't feel responsible to come out and hear. you.'

On the subject of critics and criticism Smith has definite views: I feel that any form of criticism is not positive.' 'Criticism' means: 'correction'- and that's impossible. I never have a 'bad night' because I don't accept the understanding of playing.

I consider whatever I play at whatever.time to be my absolute all. Most of the people writing in the jazz magazines are what I would call buffs. Instead of writing record reviews, creative journalists might better devote time to studying the various periods of the music and prepare expert analyses of the form, structure, and aesthetics of the music. 

"Instead of going to a concert and criticizing this player or that, write a poem or a novel section on that experience like James Baldwin and Richard Wright have done. Although I like Martin Williams' book, The Jazz Tradition I don't think one white man should head an exploration into black music such as he is doing at the Smithsonian Institute. Instead. I think there should be a federation or panel of, say, seven people with three being black. one white person from America, one Japanese, one Englishman, and one from,somewhere else."

Smith likes to think of the music and particularly of the players, historically, in terms of dynasties and of the different instruments, as royal families with clearly traceable lineages. 

"I love all trumpet players and I love the way they play. I know the characteristics of the archetypal players and how the different lines came along..Trumpet playing came from Joseph Oliver. Louis Armstrong's early solos are identical in rhythmic shape and conceptualization to Oliver's. In Oliver's ballads, the trumpet player began to take dominance in the different lines that were hooked together to make the ensembles. Very shortly the ensemble begins to break down as the essential deliverer of the music. Armstrong is an innovator because he saw where this kind of playing could go and he did it, beginning with early pieces like Hot Potato, Weather Bird, and West End Blues."

Smith's own playing reflects this close scrutiny and historical awareness of what has gone on before him. And the deeper the listener's awareness, the more of these musical references he hears in Smith - to Miles, Clifford Brown, Fats Navarro, Don Cherry, and to all the great players of the music, not just the trumpet players.

"I look at the music," Smith says,-"in the sense of a mission and I look upon traveling to other cities like the astronauts traveling in space, or in earlier times, like explorers traveling to other continents to discover what new places had to offer and also to spread their essential wisdom." db


http://musicians.allaboutjazz.com/wadadaleosmithWadada Leo Smith
 

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ISHMAEL WADADA LEO SMITH trumpet-player, multi- instrumentalist, composer and improviser has been active in the creative contemporary world music for over thirty years. His theory of Jazz and World music was significant in his music development as an artist and educator.

Born in Leland, Mississippi, Smith's early musical life began in the high school concert and marching bands. At the age of thirteen, he became immersed within the Delta Blues and Improvisation music traditions. He received his formal musical education with his father, the U.S. Military band program (1963), Sherwood School of Music (1967-69), and Wesleyan University (1975-76).

As an Improvisor-Composer, Smith has studied a variety of music cultures (African, Japanese, Indonesian, European and American) and has developed a Jazz and world music theory, and a notation system to fully express this music which he calls “Ankhrasmation”.

He has taught at the University of New Haven 1975-'76, the Creative Music Studio in Woodstock, NY. 1975-'78, and Bard College 1987-'93. He is currently a professor of Music at the California Institute of the Arts, and is the director of the MFA program in African American Improvisation. He is a member of ASCAP Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians.

Mr. Smith's awards includes: Islamic World Arts Initiative of Arts International 2004, Meet the Composer/ Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Commissioning Program 1996, Asian Cultural Council Grantee to Japan June-Augast 1993; Meet the Composer/ Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Commissioning Program 1990; New York Foundation on the Arts Fellowship in Music 1990; Numerous Meet the Composer Grants since1977; and National Eneowment for the Arts Music Grants 1972, 1974, 1981.

Mr. Smith's music philosophy Notes (8 Pieces) Source a New. World Music: Creative Music has been published by Kiom Press 1973, translated and published in Japan by Zen-On Music Company Ltd. 1976.

In 1981 Notes was translated into Italian and published by Nistri-Litschi Editori. He was invited to a conference of artists, scientists and philosophers “Third Culture Copenhagen” in Denmark 1996, and presented a paper on his Ankhrasmation music theory and notational system for creative musicians. His interview was recorded for Denmark T.V., broadcasted September 1996.

He has composed music for solo, ensemble, classical and creative orchestra and stage works. His solo piano music has been performed by Ms. Ursula Opens, Ms. Marilyn Crispell, Mr. David Rosenboom and Ms. Vickie Ray.

Mr. Smith's Nda-Kulture ensemble has performed most of his music since 1970. His compositions has been performed by other contemporary music ensembles: AACM -Orchestra, Kronos Quartet, Da Capo Chamber Player, New Century Players, San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, Contemporary Chamber Players (University of Chicago), S.E.M. Ensemble and California E.A.R. Unit.

Mr. Smith's music for multi-ensembles has been performed since 1969, and his largest work Odwira for 12 multi-ensemble-units was performed in California I stitute of the Arts, March 1995. His Noh piece Heart Reflections was performed in Merkin Concert Hall, NY., November 1996.

Some of the artists Mr. Smith has performed with are : Muhal Richard Abrams, Anthony Braxton, Leroy Jenkins, Roscoe Mitchell, Lester Bowie, Richard Teitelbaum, Joseph Jarman, George Lewis, Cecil Taylor, Andrew Cyrill, Oliver Lake, Anthony Davis, Carla Bley, David Murray, Don Cherry, Jeanne Lee, Milton Campbell, Henry Brant, Richard Davis, Tadao Sawai, Ed Blackwell, Sabu Toyozumi, Peter Kowald, Kazuko Shiraishi, Han Bennink, Misja Mengelberg, Marion Brown, Kazutoki Umezu, Kosei Yamamoto, Charlie Haden, Kang Tae Hwan, Kim Dae Hwan, Tom Buckner, Malachi Favors Magoustous and Jack Dejohnette among many others.  
 

 

More english interviews and articles

http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/blogs/artsdesk/music/2010/11/19/what-im-interested-in-is-sound-a-conversation-with-wadada-leo-smith/ 

“What I’m Interested in Is Sound”: A Conversation With Wadada Leo Smith

by Michael J. West
November 19, 2010
Washington City Paper

This image is a section of a musical score by Wadada Leo Smith, the avant-garde trumpeter. Obviously, he doesn't use notation as you and I recognize it; Smith has a musical system he calls "Ankhrasmation," which merges the ideas of composition, improvisation, and performance into a single construction.

 

Currently a faculty member at the California Institute of the Arts, Smith is working on a large set of these compositions, Ten Freedom Summers, commissioned by Chamber Music America and the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation; he and his Golden Quartet will be giving some parts their East Coast premiere at the Library of Congress. Ahead of that performance, Smith took time to talk about Ankhrasmation and the band that plays it, and to school WCP on his music's connection to Miles Davis.

Washington City Paper: This band seems inclined toward the Miles Davis mold of electronics in jazz. Tell me about that.

Wadada Leo Smith: I’ve been working with electronics for over ten years. And with Golden Quartet, the only recording where we have used any electronics is the recent recording [Spiritual Dimensions], the one that was done at the Vision Festival. And if you notice, only one or two pieces have electronics on it. And when you look at the electronics that we use, the only thing that makes it sound similar to the past is that there’s a Fender Rhodes there. Most people can’t get past the idea that the Fender is used that way again.

And let me say this about the comparison everybody likes to make with Miles Davis’ music. Miles Davis’ music was a fantastic music, and it’s a major influence on modern music in America, and maybe around the world. But the language he used is quite different than any of the language that I use. Miles dealt with a much more refined notion of fusion; I'm not looking at fusion. What I’m interested in is sound, and all the possibilities that there are with sound.

The common ground is this: Miles Davis is a great trumpet player; Wadada Leo Smith is a great trumpet player. He has a tremendous dramatic use of his musical language; I do the same thing. He has an exceptional range; I have an exceptional range. Then, when you look at the language inside that range, it’s very, very different. But still, the relationship is very deep. And I don’t mean it just in terms of music; I mean it in terms of states of awareness. For example, I’ve had a series of dreams over the last 15 years that relate to Miles Davis and me.

WCP: Do you feel in communication with him when you are playing?

WLS: No, I don’t feel that when I’m playing, because for me, the only way I can play is to be completely absent of all the stuff that is happening. One of the things that I used to reduce, let’s say, 50 to 60 percent of the distortion around me, is that I close my eyes. And then the other part is deep focus—if you’ve got deep focus, you can hear the ensemble playing, but they are not going to control you or dictate the way you go because you have achieved this kind of connection yet detachment. So when I’m in that state of mind, and I open my eyes, I am literally surprised that I’m playing before somebody.

WCP: How does the Golden Quartet differ, as a concept, from other ensembles and projects you’ve worked on? How does it work in conjunction with those other projects?

WLS: This is the distinction: When I made the Golden Quartet, my intention was to make an ensemble that I would keep for life. It’s the only ensemble that I’ve ever had that intention. And I wanted to make a nod toward the classical notion of the ensemble: piano, bass, drums, and the horn. It feels to me kind of like the four cardinal points that we have in creation, the north, south, east, and west. It’s a perfect platform for solos, duets, trios, quartets; the ensemble or orchestra.

WCP: Speaking of which, you’ve just released a trumpet-drum duo [Blue Mountain Sun Drummer, a 1986 recording with the late Ed Blackwell], your second in two years and fifth overall. What attracts you to that configuration?

WLS: There’s actually another one with a guy in Sweden that’s not out yet, and there’s one in the can with Hamid Drake that’s not out yet. I love drum and trumpet things. It goes back to that whole early brass-band music, where the brass and the percussion kind of made things happen. Actually I was always impressed with duets, primarily because of Louis Armstrong and Earl Hines. That music is fantastic. Joseph Oliver and Jelly Roll Morton also had duets, and they covered one of the same pieces, “Weather Bird.” It’s just a fascinating thing to me.

WCP: The fact that you play "Blue Mountain Sun Drummer" on your previous duet record [America, with Jack DeJohnette] suggests that the project meant a great deal to you.

WLS: It did, and I’ll tell you what: on that duet with Jack, I was wondering how I could make a connection with the duet with Ed. So I put the same melody, with a few twists and turns, into that recording that I made with Jack. I did it because I wanted to make that connection with Ed, and see if I could pull it forward. And I’m glad I did, because to tell you the truth that’s what inspired me to go back and get this project and look at it again.

WCP: Let’s talk about Ankhrasmation. When you are going over this with musicians, how much of the images and symbolism do you explain, and how much do you leave up to their own interpretation?

WLS: Well, there’s quite a bit that’s left up to them. In playing an Ankhrasmation score, you have to do research, independent of anyone else in the ensemble. So let’s say you’ve got one of those half triangles, which is a velocity unit, and let’s say that velocity unit is colored red. Each person will take that velocity unit and determine how fast or slow that velocity unit develops, depending on which symbol it is—but even if they all have the same symbol, it would by nature never come out to be the same velocity.

As for the red, the color has to be symbolically referenced. Red could be referenced as blood, for example, or it could be referenced as a cherry. If it’s referenced as blood, then they have to go and do the research and find out about all the properties of blood and come up with some reference of how blood is used in humans or other creatures. Then they start to transform that data about blood into musical property, which they are not allowed to tell me about because when we all get together, and we all got red, if there’s two of us or nine of us, we end up with two or nine different ideas about that red, and two or nine different ideas about that velocity: how fast it evolves, and how fast it’s moving horizontally.

But if you take the cherry, the cherry’s got an outer skin that’s red, and it also has a pit inside of it. It has a stem that comes out of the center of it. And you would take all of those elements and break them down into different parts and research them. Or you could make the color red have a relationship with sunlight, and that would mean you would reference off the spectrum of light. It’s left up to the musician to decide what the color red references.

WCP: With so much research and depth, doesn’t the music lose some of the spontaneity?

WLS: No, it doesn’t lose any. Because once the person does their research and begins to transform that into music, it’s just like practicing a score for any other kind of music. For example, when a guy plays music off a five line staff, he’s gotta know how to make that E-flat or that B-flat or that F. That’s the same kind of information; before, they’ve practiced that E-flat, F, B-flat, to make sure they can play it properly. That’s what’s happening with an ankhrasmation score: we actually work through it and find the level of creativity that comes out of it.

WCP: Do you consider yourself a composer?

WLS: I still call myself a composer, yes: a composer-performer-improviser. A composer is one that makes notes on some kind of surface or something; it could be musical notes, or it could be images or whatever. A performer will interpret those notes, and an improviser will bring that other quality, which is himself or herself, and transform those two other qualities into something that no one could ever imagine it would be until after it’s done.

Photo: California Institute of the Arts 

 

Onward & Upward

The astounding creative trajectory of avant-garde veteran Wadada Leo Smith

by Josef Woodard

JazzTimes

December 2008

Photo by Lignel/Dalle
"If people had truly endorsed the music of the '60s-I don't mean just liked it, but understood that it was showing the best example of democratic principles and also the philosophical and actual notion of freedom-then our society would be way ahead. We probably would have already had an African-American and a woman as president."

It's fair to say that veteran trumpeter-composer-educator Wadada Leo Smith has been in the midst of a renaissance during the last several years. Yes, it has been a good millennium for him so far, in terms of public visibility. But appearances are deceiving when it comes to jazz figures working steadily on the fringes, equipped with highly personalized visions of what his or her music can and should be. 

Smith, a bold, proud product of the AACM (Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians) revolution starting in the 1960s, has been linked to the avant-garde side of the jazz fence, but has been directly inspired and colored by the legacies of trumpeters from Louis Armstrong to Booker Little to Miles Davis and many stops in between. He has developed a fascinating and distinctive sound on his horn-at once cerebral and visceral-and has also forged his own musical language and notation system, called "Ankhrasmation,"and been an educator for years, settled since the mid-'90s at the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) outside of Los Angeles. 

In general, Smith, now 66 and going as strongly as ever, has generally been going about his unique creative business for years, regardless of the degrees of external attention paid. Attentions, though, are headed his way with increasing frequency. Relatively recent releases have included live duets with fellow AACM alum Anthony Braxton, on the Pi label, and a valuable four-disc set of Smith's '70s recordings from his own Kabell label, Kabell Years: 1971-1979, on Tzadik. In another corner of his suddenly burgeoning discography, Smith has been the man with the horn in an ongoing Miles tribute project called Yo Miles!, in cahoots with guitarist Henry Kaiser, most recently releasing Upriver in 2005. 

This year, Smith's sound and artistic fervor are in the air, in terms of ongoing projects and performances and in the archival form of a gripping new live album, Tabligh (Cuneiform), which documents a special incarnation of his Golden Quartet, recorded in 2006 at the REDCAT Theater in Los Angeles. REDCAT (Roy and Edna Disney CalArts Theater) is the downstairs "black box"space in the grand Walt Disney Concert Hall in L.A., and the home of Smith's ongoing Creative Music Festival (which last year hosted the Art Ensemble of Chicago).

Smith's concert was one of the L.A. area's finest jazz events that year, due in no small part to the high level of intrigue and dialogue between Smith, volcanic drummer Ronald Shannon Jackson, pianist Vijay Iyer and bassist John Lindberg. Electro-acoustic timbres and shifting relationships of structure and improvisation conspired toward a refreshing new entity in the jazz scene, with echoes of '70s Miles electric-jazz voodoo, AACM ideals and something new and personal.

If the relatively new Golden Quartet provides Smith with a fine and fluid vehicle for his ideas, the specific form is an evolution-in-progress. The first edition of Smith's Golden Quartet, heard on the 2002 album The Year of the Elephant (Pi), included drummer Jack DeJohnette (for whom he wrote the song "DeJohnette"), bassist Malachi Favors (who passed away in 2004) and pianist Anthony Davis. A newer edition, heard in quintet format at this year's Vision Festival in New York City, featured Iyer and Lindberg along with the twin-drum force of Don Moye and Pheeroan akLaff.

"Over the last 15 years,"Smith comments, "I would have to say that my works are not hidden anymore. The thing that reminds me about how I have moved and not looked back is that when I listen to some of those CDs, to me they're new, because I don't spend time listening to them. They're still new to me. I'm surprised. I wonder sometimes, "Who is that playing?" he says with a laugh. 

At the time of this interview, Smith was ensconced in the remote, natural splendor at the Djerassi Resident Artists program, in the woody hills outside of Palo Alto, Calif. He was introduced to the Djerassi program through an involvement in the celebrated and adventurous Other Minds Festival in San Francisco in 2007, in which Djerassi plays a hosting role. Smith is an ideal candidate for the artist residency and also the Other Minds Festival, rooted in contemporary classical music as well as avant-garde jazz and experimental energies: Smith has been actively involved in all of the above cultural niches.

While in his Djerassi residency, Smith was avidly working on two larger projects: a collection called Cosmic Music and another multi-disciplinary work-in-progress dealing with "the issues of borders, refugees and immigrants."He plans to present the piece in several American cities. 

This opus, in fact, promises to be one of Smith's most ambitious projects yet, involving music for a 12-piece ensemble, video art collaborations and dialogues on the core subject. He comments that "all over the world, in Europe, in Asia and in the United States, (nations are) loaded with immigrants, refugees and so on. People don't know how to accept them into society."

Smith explains that "each of the programs will have different music and also I'll use a different set of filmmakers and video artists to give a little bit of an image, not necessarily images that depict the situation, but creative images that cause people to think in a provocative way. After each of those performances, I hope to have discussions about possible solutions to the problem."

Dealing with real socio-political and historical topics is nothing new for Smith. "I've always looked at what was happening out there,"he says. "My Tabligh deals with the issue of the way people look at Islamic ideas and people in Islam."

LEO SMITH.  Photo by Alan Nahigian

On the morning before our interview, he had started working on a new tune in tribute to Mississippi political activist Fannie Lou Hamer, and the opening tune on Tabligh is called "Rosa Parks." Does he find himself drawn more to "real world" subjects of late?

"Yes, I do,"Smith says. "I find, also, that when I do write about these subjects, there is enough written material on them to do the research. That boosts me tremendously."The back stories feed his musical thinking, as on "Rosa Parks,"in which "the horizontal form keeps repeating and changing and being eclipsed-has to do with the kind of notion that Rosa Parks set out thinking about, the progressive movement towards an open society."

Projecting a conceptual basis in his music is central to Smith's aesthetic, which is never about penning old school head-solo-head type tunes. "Every one of my pieces has to have something uniquely occurring in them for them to be pieces,"he says. "Otherwise, I won't do them."

Expanding on the connection of musical and political thought, Smith comments that "my contention has always been that the best model of democratic principles in action is the ensemble in creative music, or the ensembles in jazz. They are the perfect model, because the individual is celebrated and so is the collective, and neither one outweighs the other, which is quite an unusual event.

"If people had truly endorsed the music of the '60s-I don't mean just liked it, but understood that it was showing the best example of democratic principles and also the philosophical and actual notion of freedom-then our society would be way ahead. We probably would have already had an African-American and a woman as president."

Such inferences of culture-fueled idealism lead naturally to the subject of the AACM, which celebrated its 40th anniversary in 2005. "The AACM,"Smith suggests, "looked at how you change perception about an age-old thing. People were running around talking about jazz. AACM was talking about creative music. That right there was a different kind of phenomenon. And then we talked about free music. We never said free improvisation or free this-or-that, or a free avant-garde-none of those names. We called it creative music and also free music. 

"We understood that freedom to imply that there are differences between the notion of freedom in a philosophical context and also in the idea of freedom as a true exercise of democratic practice. So the AACM has had a great impact."

In the mix of Smith's current projects, Golden Quartet holds a special fascination and future, and the specific group captured at its prime at REDCAT impressed him enough to put the live recording out in the world. In the group, Smith has now worked with several different drummers, starting with DeJohnette and also including the dazzling young Nasheet Waits. 

But, he says, "The Shannon Jackson dates with Golden Quartet gave it this other kind of feeling for the drumming. He used two bass drums. He's also a little-how do you say it?-rambunctious and rough, which I like in drumming. And he has a good sense of dramatics in playing, which I also like very much. But the biggest thing is that he was just the opposite of Jack DeJohnette, which I wanted."

But he adds that, "When you start out with Jack DeJohnette at the drums, you've got to have a powerful drummer. Otherwise, you might as well erase the name and start out with something else. 

"I decided at the very beginning that Golden Quartet would be a lifelong quartet of mine, no matter what the personnel was or which direction it might go, whether it goes to the Golden Quintet or whatever, it will still be in that genre. The idea is that of one horn player and rhythm. No saxophones, no trombones, no violins; just the trumpet and rhythm. If I expanded it again to the Golden Sextet, it may have two pianos or two basses, but that's the whole idea, trying to capture that classic sound of the early days."

In discussing the trumpet players he has been most affected by, Smith points to the styles-and band-leading qualities-of Louis Armstrong, Clifford Brown, Booker Little, Lee Morgan and Miles. He notes that "Those, to me, are like perfect models of trumpet-leading ensembles that show something different. The most perfect of those, of course, is Booker Little and Miles Davis."

And like those players, Smith has a keen approach to timbre and space, and melodic logic rubbing up against the outskirts of abstraction. Smith's affection and artful flair for Miles homage is well known, but he also learned much from Little, the innovative, lyrical and underrated figure in 1960s jazz who died far too young. "When you die too young and were kind of marginally recognized before you died, you never have a chance. In his day, that was a brilliant composer and trumpeter and music-thinker. I started thinking about multiphonics through an interview that Booker Little gave, where he was talking about being able to make multiphonics on the trumpet. Even though he never really did it, he was thinking about exploring that area."

Over time, Smith has moved laterally between rock-inflected electric music and more acoustic settings, and even in contexts with tentacles in contemporary classical and world music (as on his engaging ECM album Kulture Jazz). On that basis, Smith might seem an eclectic wanderer. But he sees a conceptual common thread in his projects.

As Smith says, "I contend this: all the music I write is still creative music, written for those ensembles. The experiment is to see what kind of interplay, what kind of music intellect that these ensembles can grab onto, using these same kind of musical properties that come out of my own ensembles. So the experiment is with ensembles, as opposed to musical style and language. I use the same language. All of the music I ever write can be played by any one of my ensembles, and often they do play them."

Placing his music under the jazz umbrella doesn't seem complete or coherent, a point of view he agrees with and has carried over from the AACM ideology. Smith points out that, "When you match our music up and you play them right side by side with jazz, they stand out as un-jazz. If you talk to the players that play what they define as jazz from that tradition, they don't see us as playing jazz. And if you look at some of the writers who write about this music, they don't see us as playing jazz, even though they write about us as being jazz.

"There is kind of a heavy penalty that somehow doesn't give us the chance to say exactly what it is that we do. It's a political penalty. For example, the European players who came out and said they were playing free improvisation, nobody balked at them at all. Everybody writes about them in terms of free improvisation. No one put them in the jazz community. But when it comes to an American who happened to be African-American, they lump them in there. What is this thing? I don't know what it is except I think it's a political move. Maybe it used to be based around marketing, but now it's not based around that at all."

Forty-plus years into his musical journey, Smith still occupies a unique place in jazz-or just outside of it, depending on one's perspective. For much of that time, he has honed a vocabulary never indebted to any particular stream or mainstream. He has partly been enabled by making his livelihood in education, a position he takes seriously. But Smith has also been emboldened by an assured sense of artistic mission.

As of summer 2008, Smith reports, "I feel more driven now than ever. I'm writing more music than I've ever written before. I have over a thousand pieces. This is just music on note staffs. I have another couple of hundred pieces dealing with the "Ankhrasmation"language. I'm in a flow that could not be better, and it has been that way since the turn of the century. 

"Also, performance-wise, I've gotten a chance to play more of my music since the turn of the century than ever before. Two of the main reasons were the Golden Quartet and the Yo Miles! music. Both of those ensembles show something distinctly about what I was doing. They also gave people a chance to see that there was other stuff in the bag."He adds, with a laugh, "And there's still other stuff in the bag that they haven't heard yet, or seen."

Has Smith been frustrated by the lack of opportunities to get his music heard in the past? "No, not really,"he says. "Right now, what I care about more than anything is discovering new ways and new ideas and new languages for how to create music. To me, that's very exciting-new languages, new systems, and having the courage not to be bothered when even your closest friends don't understand you.

"The idea of not-acceptance is fine. It's really fine, because look, somehow you get enough material out there and somehow it makes a difference or dents somewhere. To me, that's already success."

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Originally published in December 2008

http://www.wadadaleosmith.com/pages/interviews_eng_2.html#yo

 

more english interviews and articles

 
Jazz Notes:
Creating music that's never the same twice
by Bill Beuttler
BOSTON GLOBE CORRESPONDENT, 2005

 

The last time the avant-garde trumpeter and composer Wadada Leo Smith performed in Boston was 17 years ago, when he played a 1988 duet set with the late, great drummer Ed Blackwell. So maybe it's fitting that his return visit tomorrow night, for a Boston Creative Music Alliance concert at the Institute of Contemporary Art, will involve only Smith and percussion as well.

This time around, though, the percussion will come from the laptop computer of Ikue Mori, best known for her work with cuttingedge types such as Arto Lindsay and John Zorn. And Smith, too, will be accessing electronic effects via his horn.

Opportunities to hear what they sound like together are rare. Smith and Mori have played a handful of concerts in New York, and one more apiece in Portugal and Bosnia. And Mori appears on two duet tracks on Smith's CD "Luminous Axis," which came out in 2002 on Zorn's Tzadik label.

"It does have an electronic feel to it:' says Smith, 63, by phone from his California home. "But I would say it's much warmer than most electronic music. And it's creative, meaning that when we step on the stage we dont have a note in mind, we don't have a rhythm in mind. All we have in mind is that we're going to take this score, or we're going make a collaborative improvisation, and we go from there,"

All of this is done without rehearsal. "If they know the language," Smith says, improvising musicians "are able to engage with each other in a very intriguing way and come up with something that's quite brilliant. And, in fact, quite heroic, to tell you the truth."

The language to which Smith refers is Ankhrasmation, the name he has given to the distinctive method of music notation he has been developing since his days in Chicago in the late '60s and early '70s with Muhal Richard Abrams, Anthony Braxton, and other forward-looking cohorts in the legendary AACM, or Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians

The word Ankhrasmation, explains Smith, was derived by splicing together the ancient Egyptian word for "vital life force" ('Ankh"), the Amharic word for "head" or "father" ("Ras"), and a universal word for mother: "Ma." ("Wadada" in case you're wondering, is the Amharic word for "love.")

In practice, Ankhrasmation uses symbols to sketch out a roadmap for improvisation. A composition including the symbol "orange," for example, would require Smith and Mori to have thought deeply about how they could musically reference all aspects of "orange" - not just the color, but the fruit and its myriad characteristics as well. Then they take those reference points and improvise on them. No two times through a Smith composition are the same.

"Once you've made a work of art out of it," says Smith, "you cant repeat it. That's the kind of excitement that this kind of language houses, and for me, that's very important, because it keeps you fresh."

Mori, via e-mail, agrees.

"Following the Ankhrasmation method is like following the map of the cosmic journey with Wadada or something;' she explains. "It's not like free improvisation with others, because of the events you have to create [to] express the color and- shape in a certain time. But ultimately the form of the music we create is very intuitive, and anything could happen during the journey. I preprogram and prepare some sounds and patterns with my computer and manipulate and recombine them live."

Smith says Mori has approached Ankhrasmation and the research it entails more thoroughly than anyone else he has worked with. "This woman is the best in the world" he enthuses. "And creatively she matches anything that I can do or anybody else can do."

That's high praise coming from Smith, whose main working bands of late have been the two incarnations of his Golden Quartet, the first of them an all-star ensemble including Anthony Davis on piano, Malachi Favors on bass, and Jack DeJohnette on drums. After the death of Favors last year, -Smith revamped the quartet to include Vijay Iyer on piano, John Lindberg on bass, and Ronald Shannon Jackson on drums.

Smith claims to find the new contingent even more exciting than its predecessor, mostly because it adds electronics to the earlier groups all-acoustic mix.

" Let's say the other quartet was like John the Baptist," says Smith, laughing. "This quartet is like Jesus Christ. I mean, if I can use a metaphor like that."

Beyond that, Smith recorded last year's CD "Lake Biwa with his Silver Orchestra - Smith's trumpet, Zorns saxophone, tuba, two basses, three drummers, and a rotating cast of four pianists - and he has a new trio in the works, called Blue Carbon, with Jackson again on drums and Braxton's son Tyondai on electronically processed guitar and voice.

This is all squeezed around Smith's professorial duties at California Institute of the Arts, where he has taught for I I years - the first five as the Dizzy Gillespie chair in jazz studies and since then in a program of his own design in African-American improvisational music.

All this may seem far removed from Smith's early days growing up in Mississippi and hitting the road as a teenager with blues great Little Milton. But don't be so sure. Just last spring he taught a seminar on the blues, delving deeply into the work of Charlie Patton, Son House, and Blind Lemon Jefferson.

" I listen to the blues all the time," Smith says. "I think that the blues is the most fundamental notion about freedom. And it also has the deepest commitment toward improvisation."

Yo, Wadada! Leo Smith's Long Pilgrimage
by Howard Mandel
jazzhouse.org

"When I went to Chicago in 1967 -- after five years in six Army bands -- I had already thought about what I wanted to do in music," says Wadada Leo Smith, the trumpeter, composer, and philosopher whose insightful, alternative vision of sound, spirit, and society is now, finally, gaining its fair share of attention. "I arrived with an armload of music for improvisers and also for contemporary ensembles. When I got there, very few people were doing those kinds of things. But immediately, when I opened up the bag and showed people what I had, things got roughed up. All around and straight across, you know."

All across, straight around, up and out or down and in, Mississippi-born and (as of last February) Mecca-bound Smith truly has remained consistent -- from the first recording of his own music, "The Bell," on Anthony Braxton's Three Compositions of New Jazz (Delmark) 35 years ago through the 2002 release by his Golden Quartet, The Year of the Elephant (Pi). This is far from saying he's always sounded the same, although Smith has an identifiable tone: larger, deeper, fuller and more burnished than one might justifiably expect from the physically slight and temperamentally self-contained man, now 63.He also possesses an articulated, detailedway with along gliss, and takes exceptional liberties with phrasing, resulting in unpredictably structured solos. Indeed, since emerging from the horn section of rhythm 'n' blues bands (such as the crack troupe that backed Little Milton Campbell on his Chess recordings) into the forefront of Chicago's Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians and on to unusual success in academia, Smith has been a natural individualist and iconoclast, never going along with any crowd for the riches or the ride, seldom doing a thing that could be considered typical even among the atypical brethern of the avant garde.

The stepson of Delta bluesman Little Bill (Alex) Wallace, Smith rejected Little Milton's late '60s invitation to be the well-paid straw-boss of his road band because he didn't like to travel -- and instead flew off to Europe for a year with Braxton, violinist Leroy Jenkins and drummer Steve McCall (they recorded in Paris for BYG/Actuel). Upon his return to the States in 1970, instead of heading back to Chicago or throwing himself on New York (despite a successful Manhattan stand with Braxton, Jenkins, McCall, pianist Muhal Richard Abrams and bassist Richard Davis as the Creative Construction Company, whose concerts were recorded on two LPS issued by Muse) Smith settled in New Haven, Connecticut, where he became mentor to a heretofore unknown black and tan coterie of experimentalists including pianist Anthony Davis, vibist Bobby Naughton, reedist Dwight Andrews, and bassist Wes Brown.

An early proponent of self-production, whose hard-to-find albums on his Kabell label are scheduled for re-release in a four CD box this spring by John Zorn's Tzadik imprint, Smith also recorded uncompromisingly for ECM, bringing together fellow trumpeters Lester Bowie and Kenny Wheeler on the album Divine Love. His timbral experiments have extended to one composition -- dedicated to Braxton -- for his trumpet and five harps (recorded on Spirit Catcher, Nessa). He's certainly the only Wesleyan University-trained ethnomusicologist, former Rastafarian and currently devout Muslim to have collaborated with British guitar phenomenologist Derek Bailey in Company, German bassist Peter Kovald and drummer Gunter Sommer in a trio of their own, and players including the late Glenn Horiuchi employing traditional Asian instruments in N'Da Kulture, a music/poetry group (Smith's wife Harumi recited in English and Japanese).

In the late '80s Wadada instituted what has become a de facto AACM chair of music instruction at New York's Bard College (currently held by drummer Thurman Barker), and since 1993 he's held the Dizzy Gillespie chair on the music faculty of California Institute of the Arts. No other African-American horn players of Smith's generation had the interest or gumption to revisit the early '70s electric repertoire of Miles Davis, as Smith did with Left Coast adventurers Henry Kaiser, Niles Cline, Lukas Ligeti, the ROVA Sax Quartet, Paul Plimley and John Medeski (among others) on the '98 two CD set Yo Miles!, and a still-unreleased third volume. No one but Smith would be able to assemble a Golden Quartet comprising Anthony Davis, bassist Malachi Favors, and drummer Jack DeJohnette -- all of whom live in different cities, and have enjoyed less total rehearsal time than they've spent in the studio, recording.

Quietly, for a brassman, Smith has pursued a single goal since, as he says, he first "picked up pen and trumpet, at the same time, to compose. I started to compose not knowing what note was there to be composed of. I was 12 yrs old." Smith's quest from then on has been to explore and explicate his personal esthetic principles, which circa 1977 he dubbed Ankhrasmation. Through what he describes as a simultaneously symbolic and systematic approach, Smith reconstrues the hierarchy of Western harmony, motion and melody as well as processes of composition and improvisation, much in the way Ornette Coleman has conceived of his own grand unification theory, harmolodics. Unfortunately, in our relatively brief though engaging and wide-ranging conversation, Smith demonstrated that Ankhrasmation, like harmolodics, eludes description or definition.

"Ankhrasmation music uses no pictures of notes, no designs of notes; it's a symbolic interpretation of what's there. It is a way of making music that has a little bit of both improvisation and composition inside it, but it's an entirely different thing because it's all symbolic," he explained. Or did he?

"I'm the guy that's the loner," Smith began over the phone from his home on the outskirts of Los Angeles. "I've always been a loner. I went to New Haven for the same reason. By that I mean: I spend my time contemplating how to do this [make music], and researching how to put it together. You can do that in a small or semi-rural town like I've been living in for the last 10 or 12 years. You can do those kinds of things and not be disturbed by going across the planet to play every gig that a human being might offer you. At first it may seem weird, you feel a little bit odd because you're not doing that, but once you start to research, once you start finding all these systems, these ways of looking at things and doing things in all these different contexts, the pleasure is there in not doing that."

The infrequency of Smith's personal appearances, along with the imperturbably personal quality of his recordings during the past 35 years, has lent the trumpeter an aura of mysterious charisma. He believes scarcity makes the ears grow more open; at least, so it seems to work between him and his fans.

"When my guys hear me once every year or every two or three years, they all come up to me and say, 'Wow, that was very different or very fresh; I haven't heard anything like that,'" Smith asserted with some pride. "And that tells me it was the right choice [not to globetrot], even though that wasn't my choice originally. It was forced on me by circumstance."

What circumstance was that?

"I couldn't buy a gig!" he burst out laughing. Can it really be that no one wanted to hire a musician who'd held his own with Kalaparusha Ara Difda, Muhal Richard Abrams, Henry Threadgill, et al? "Well, I was always taught by people I respected that if one door doesn't open, you go to another door. That door I opened was research. And I'm telling you, that's the second best thing I did, other than picking up the trumpet and the pen."

To Smith, the trumpet, the pen, and music research were tools to use to shape the world more to his liking as far back as 1970. "When I was in Paris with Anthony Braxton, a foreigner in an exotic country -- well, that's nice sometimes, and I enjoyed it," he said. "But American music is a whole cultural phenomenon, not something that's created in a vacuum. And the cultural environment in the U.S. is deep.

"It was exciting at that time, how music interacted in a social way to exact change in society. Freedom is something we were after in both the social and esthetic moment. Musically, freedom served as a model for whoever could grasp it. Of course, socially we failed -- most obviously in the area of human rights, because power and wealth still control how people with with each other. Enron is an example of how the old type of culture has prevailed. But artists can use their visions to transform society by getting people to see ordinary stuff anew, and open up. The artist is a mediator who helps people see things in new ways, and can also serve as a moral visionary.

"Basically, human beings -- all of us including artists -- have such a problem every day of waking up and getting through the routines, getting by as safely as we can. When art comes into our lives, it can cause those routines to be seen as extraordinary, even though they don't change. They remain the same, but we see them in a different light because art comes from a place no one's ever been before.

"For example, when a writer writes about a tree or a character, that's an idea that's being translated into another medium. When the artist looks out of himself or herself and sees this other dimension that's actually old and that needs to be stirred up and made new again, they trigger some sort of reaction from the social spectrum, and that reaction becomes the dimension that the artist works in. It's like if I'm picking up garbage it's the same thing. I help to clean the environment, I help keep it clean from germs, and it actually affects the environement to have a good guy who picks up the garbage."

Smith believes such a "good guy" can be effective even if he or she has a fairly limited audience.

"Let me give you an example," he offered. "Take the early prophets. If you judge by the numbers of people they originally reached, many of them look like they were failures. But not so, because in the long run, their influence was accumulative. It had a long span to it. And all humanity is like that. The truth is that though we have different initiatives and different blood types, we're actually just one species, and our culture, our civilization is given in trust to us from each generation that that came before. So teachings are accumulative. Eventually those people that looked like they were actually failures because they had achieved very little in terms of numbers in their lifetimes, in the long run they come to look like they amount to a lot. Say Henry David Thoreau. Walden Pond may not look like much, but his writings inspires people all over the world, continuously."

What is Smith's Walden Pond? Yo Miles! is the album that probably reached his largest audience so far. On it, Smith knowingly applied himself to the most enduringly popular and inimitable of modern jazz's trumpet stylists -- evidently without any hesitation at all.

"I've been getting with the spirit of not actually caring about things because I've not had to care about them," he confided. "I've thought about them so I don't have to care about them. That means this: When I agreed to play Miles Davis music, Henry Kaiser sent me all kinds of tapes and CDs. Frankly, I listened casually to the CDs maybe once, because I'd heard them before and I didn't need to listen to them again. My thrust was to be creative in the studio. My intention wasn't to make a transcription of Miles Davis's music, my intention was to approach it in a fresh and much more open way than possibly Henry and the others did. Meaning that I didn't have to rely on the same kind of restrictions that they did. With that music, it was a joy to be in the studio, learn the piece, and then try to make it. What I did was a favor, and as a respect for Miles Davis, I tried to intertwine little moments of his music inside the music that I was doing. That's a kind of respect thing.

"You see, I'd listened to his music very carefully when I was coming up. Kind of Blue was one of the first records I had, and I listened to it very carefully, so I saw how he constructed his music, just like I also saw how other people like Booker Little and Clifford Brown constucted theirs. But their music was very different than Miles'. They had more of a vertical thing in their music. Miles had more of a horizontal thing. It was more akin to Louis Armstrong's discoveries."

Smith claimed that he, too, is a descendant of Pops.

"That's the thing everybody has missed in my music," he said. 'That doesn't mean I'm sounding like him but the deepest influence on me is the process of how the air thrust goes into the mouthpiece. Louis Armstrong had a very powerful air thrust, and so did Miles Davis, and so does Wadada Leo Smith. Very few people have that. That's what develops tone -- the difference between how your diaphragm is fixed, and how it projects or missiles the air through your chops through the mouthpiece. That's what I learned most from Louis Armstrong: How you use power and range and stamina. And the other part: the ability to execute very sharp and clear.

"You mentioned my interest in tone, timbre: That's that air thrust. It really is. The tone is a composite. and if the air thrust is mighty and powerful, it has a lot of elements that go into the composite. If it's a kind of a European tone -- and I don't mean that in any derogatory way, I mean that purely in terms of the way they make music, where it's done without any pressure -- a small part of the embouchure is used to make it. With big air thrust you have to use a wider area of your embouchure, so you have the option of great contrast and great flexibility.

"Don Cherry had a small air thrust, but what saved him and made him so beautiful was his ideas. Dizzy [Gillespie], he dissipated his composite, he put part of it in his cheeks, but the air thrust has to be like a missile. It can't go several directions then finally come to you; it has to come directly from the diaphram, straight up and straight out.

"Wynton [Marsalis] is a great trumpet player, a marvelous trumpet player, with a lot of European in him. He's learned to play jazz well, in a traditional form, just like he learned to play traditional classical music. Both of them are learned phenomena for him. I admire the fact he's done so well, musically. I'd say he's carved out some kind of legacy for himself in that context. I'd say he's akin to a European mind. He plays with almost a smile. If you look at Louis Amrstrong. Miles Davis and me, we ain't smiling when we're playing."

And yet, all three are in some sense having big fun. Making music their own ways, doing what they want.Despite Smith's glee in the project, purist devotees of the trumpeter may feel that Yo Miles! represents something of a co mpromise for their hero; that his originality is overwhelmed by the indelible associations of the compositions' original recordings and the highly amplified surroundings in which his horn is set. To Smith aficionados, his Golden Quartet's The Year of the Elephant better represents the man's simultaneously bold and mysterious essence. One can listen to it again and again, yet the music remains tantalizing, just beyond reach, challenging comprehension. Smith himself rejoices in theoverall achievement level of his Golden Quartet, debuted with an eponymous recording on Tzadik, having begun life as a drummerless trio also recorded on Tzadik.

"This band is dealing with my language," he exulted. "They come together to do that, and each makes a great contribution to do that and not really be dealing with their own concepts at all. That 's intentional, because when we made the band the idea was to have Wadada Leo Smith's Golden Quartet, to explore the things that I'm doing -- an experiment originally to see where it would go. It went someplace where it was not only pleasing but shattering for me. For the first time in 40 some years my music was played not only at the highest technical level but also at the most creative level. And so as a result of that, my 2003 New Year's resolution was to play more music, perform more often, with this band.

"One way to do that is to include a subsittute drummer sometimes . I mean, I'm so happy that this band plays my music on the level that it does, I don't want no other band. I've decided to keep the band together as long as I'm alive. But I use the Modern Jazz Quartet as a model, 'cause look, we've only been able to take like 40 per cent of the gigs we've been offered. Jack's busy, and we need a subsitute drummer sometimes."

Who does he have in mind?

"This will knock you out," Smith predicted. "Ronald Shannon Jackson. He's already approved the idea. He's living down in Texas, and that's beautiful, because none of us live in the same town, and I think that's the most ideal way to have a band. Then, when you come to a rehearsal, the musicians accept it as a higher calling, because they don't play together all the time. They also have a deep desire to not be the guy who let the band down. The respect is pretty high. The music that Shannon will bring in from his music , that will really be exciting. My dream for the next record is to have a couple pieces with Shannon on them, as well as pieces with Jack."

It's not that he has any desire to replace DeJohnette. "I met Jack in Chicago through Muha, the summer before I went to Paris," Smith remembered. " Muhal called me and said 'Jack DeJohnette is coming over, do you want to hang out with us?' And I said 'Yes.' He said, 'Bring your trumpet.' Which I was going to do anyway. I brought my trumpet. and we hung out and talked a little bit and then lo and behold we started playing. Jack taped it, by the way. And I'm telling you, it was the first time I played with a drummer who had a sensibility where I didn't feel like counting, I didn't have to feel like I was going to go this way or that way, everything came very naturally. And in the back of my head I started dreaming that I was going to play with this guy one day in the context of my music. We tried many times before the Golden Quartet happened. There were record companies that were so excited about us playing together they could hardly talk. ECM -- Manfred [Eicher] was so excited he didn't know what to do. But what ended up happenening was something would break down. Communications would break down. "

Not any more.

"Jack, he's the one in my Golden Quartet who hears everything very clearly," Smith said. "He'll listen when we're rehearsing, and if he hears something peculiar, he'll make a comment on it. He'll say, 'This point here, let's check this point out.' [Anthony] Davis, he started out at a very young age when he saw me on a street corner in New Haven and came up and said he knew who I was, could be play with me -- so he's at the roots of what's happening with the ban d. And Malachi, I've known him since Chicago. So we have a kind of organic organization in the Golden Quartet. We work everything out in rehearsal, but we've only had 10 hours of rehearsal, total."

Though he downplayed the effort, there was a lot to work out. "Pieces like 'Harumi' [from the Tzadik CD] and 'Piru' [on The Year of the Elephant] : all through my career I've had a great lyrical expression of what we would call slow pieces, but not ballads. Those two were without harmonic progression of any sort, they were all dependent on what came out and how the response or reaction occurred during those moments. Look at 'Harumi,' which came first: the way that's constructed is it has a harmonic progression to it, but it's not an absolute progression. in other words, it goes from one end to the next, but the player doesn't have to to play from one end to the next, because the player is often asked to make a new harmonic progression that interchanges with that old one that's right there, and also to ecclipse it entirely and go somewhere else. The four players can do this independently.

"Then the melody determines the reoccurence and renetrance of certain instruments. The melody shapes the horizontal motion, as opposed to a true concept of harmonic progression. And that's alway s been happening in my music, except now its more complex, I believe. I tell Davis that this is the harmonic progression that's laid out for the piece, you're free to play as much of it as you like, then create a new harmonic progression, just when you feel like that, or like eclipsing it all, and moving into something entirely different ."

Such free ideas seem like a long distance from Smith's childhood blues milieu.

"Let me tell you something about the blues," he corrected the impression. "Most people don't believe it when I tell them but it's true. If you know the great master John Lee Hooker, you know the blues is not rigid and it has no particular form. The blues is a n interchange between the one and the five [tonic an d dominant tones of the Western tempered scale], it's not a harmonic progression and it never was, and that's the freest phenomenon you could find. It's just tone, that's the only thing about it -- and I think that's a beautiful thing that it's tone, because that is generating, or connecting its unified point. To go back and forth from one to five could be boring, not exciting. But one who has the ideas and creative imagination to supply that space within the interchange, that person finds something unique. That's what the blues masters did. That's why they could make up those lyrics as they went along. They had the space to do it, it wasn't cluttered with this note of a progression, or that one. I draw on this idea of the blues all the time. The 'Miles Star' piece on The Year of the Elephant, that piece draws very much on blues, particularly its second movement after the ballad. "

Still: how does he find so many varieties with the blues, if it's all contained without the dominant-tonic field?

"Let me tell you what the guy at my first rehearsal with a blues band told me when I asked him about a key. They were playing and I asked him, 'What key are you in?' And the guy told me, 'I'm in the guitar key.' Then I went to the bass player and asked him what key he was in, and he said, 'I'm in the bass key.' So I figured I must be in the trumpet key, and I just started. What I'm trying to say is there's not much of a quantum leap at all beweeen blues and freedom. It's not unusual at all that Thelonious Monk played the blues when he was starting out, or that Albert Ayler came up in blues bands. The blues is a free kind of music. My best example is always John Lee Hooker. That guy played the blues as free as anybody I know. He wasn't really concerned if he made a chorus12 bars long or nine bars or 55 bars."

Smith admitted that touring his blues band . . . er, Golden Quartet .nbsp;. . might be difficult. "We're trying to focus on one or two performances as a hit, because the climate now is more conducive to that." But the trip uppermost in his mind was his imminent pilgrimage (hajj) to Mecca.

"It's so exciting all I can do is wash dishes and cook and then take a little nap and do some praying and some reading and try to teach my school classes," he said. "It's one of the five pillars of Islam to go to Mecca. We've been taught the concept that going to Mecca is a rehearsal for Judgement Day. As you know, we usually face Mecca when we do our prayers, but when we're in the great mosque in Mecca everybody's praying in all directions. if you notice the title on my CD 'Al-Madinah,' that's the city of the prophet [Mohammed], and I'm going to visit there, and I'm going to visit the prophet's grave. And Land's End, that's the well everybody's going to wash in, do their abolutions befor their prayers, and also drink from for the human properties of it. it was discovered back in the time of Abraham, when Ishmael and Hagar, his Egyptian mother -- You kow that story? Okay.The year of the elephant, do you know that story?

"Well, someone had messed up the Christian temple in Yemen, so one of the great warriors in Yemen decided they were going to destroy the mosque in Mecca in return. They went there with a huge army including elephants, and one of the miracles that's told in the Koran is that birds flew over them with small pellets and dropped them on them and destroyed them. That's what 'the year of the elephant' means.

"It's almost perfect for me to be going there now that the CD is out. I've been telling them at Pi records to be getting those records into some of those countries in the middle east. Some of my brothers at the mosque have listened to it and said it's very meditative msic. I think that's a good mark. It's the joy and fulfillment of this hajj. I've made a lot of preparations musically and spiritually to make this journey."

This piece appeared as the cover feature of Signal2Noise Spring 2003 issue.  Copyright © 2003 Howard Mandel




http://www.wadadaleosmith.com/pages/philos.html 

the following is an excerpt from: notes (8 pieces ) | source | a new | world | music: creative music by leo smith © 1973 notes - part 1 | notes - part 2 | notes - part 3

notes
on my
music (part 1)

The concept that i employ in my music is to consider each performer as a complete unit with each having his or her own center from which each performs independently of any other, and with this respect of autonomy the independent center of the improvisation is continuously changing depending upon the force created by individual centers at any instance from any of the units. the idea is that each improviser creates as an element of the whole, only responding to that which he is creating within himself instead of responding to the total creative energy of the different units. this attitude frees the sound-rhythm elements in an improvisation from being realized through dependent re-action. this is the fundamental principle underlining my music, in that it extends into all the source-areas of music-making, i.e. each single rhythm-sound, or a series of sound-rhythm is a complete improvisation. in other words, each element is autonomous in its relationship in the improvisation. therefore, there is no intent towards time as a period of development. rather, time is employed as an element of space: space that is determined between the distance of two sound-rhythms (here the reference to rhythm is in reference to its absoluteness: the sum of the elements and the placement of them) and space/silence that is the absence of audible sound-rhythm (just as each sound-rhythm is considered an autonomous element in an improvisation, so, too, must space and space/silence be considered; and when space and space/silence are really-realized, then we will know so well how to perceive and appreciate their uniqueness each time they appear, as easily as we perceive and appreciate the uniqueness of each sound-rhythm): i seek another dimension in music.

the forms that i use in my music other than some of the traditional or contemporary forms are EeLO'jsZ and afmie. EeLO'jsz is an ensemble-orchestra,form for improvisers, and simply refers to the grouping together of more than one orchestra, more than one ensemble, or several orchestras with one or more ensembles in such a way as to preserve the autonomy of each improviser within a group, each group within the orchestra, and each improviser within the unit total. afmie is an art-dance-music form, where the music and dance elements rely upon improvisation for deliverance.

the dance is scored as sound-rhythm movement, and the symbols used for both musician and dancer are the same. here, too, the movements for the dance are in the the same relationship to each other and to the sound-rhythms as was outlined earlier for the music alone (i.e. autonomous). so, the elements of the dance as well as of the music are conceived without past or future.

i am an improviser, and my music is for the improviser. in most cases, my improvisations are conceived for multi-instrumentalists, i.e. for those who approach all of their instruments as one complete instrument, who perform on all of their instruments as if they were only one instrument. the attitude of the multi-instrumentalist should be the same as one who performs on only one instrument. this concept of all instruments as component parts of the total instrument offers the improviser a world of sound-rhythm as diverse as the many different component parts of the instrument.


n
o
t
e
s
(part 2)

the wonder and gorgeousness of nature - 

i've heard the sounds of the crickets, the birds, the whirling about and clinging of the wind, the floating waves ' and clashing of water against rocks, the love of thunder and beauty that prevails during and after the lightening - the - toiling of souls throughout the world in suffering - the moments of realization, of oneness, of realness in all of these make and contribute to the wholeness of my music - the sound- rhythm beyond - beyond - is what i'm after through this precious and glorious art of the black man - this improvisational music that i see, that i feel, that bursts all about us in this world, that's conveyed to us from the many different other worlds and that's held intact through our minds from the universe - these are life sources that bring forth love through the creative ability of all man - these are the sources that spur, that prompt the nowness, right-nowness,totality of the improviser, the creative improviser - our music is so personal (the improviser's) that it takes in the natural world of all, the universal principles of all when created through the cosmic powers of the all, and this personalness as contributed by man are, too, of the source of the universal mind of all is interpreted by the man and therefore the creations of man cannot be universal - only cosmic creations are universal, as a mountain or valley or rivers and planets - i, a black man, a creative improviser, strive, through my improvisations and as an improviser to pay homage to the black, the blackness of a people, and that these creations themselves are for all, and the natural laws that are prevailing under these creations are relative as they are interpreted or perceived by beings of other peoples and thus they must extract what is of universality for themselves to each and every individual, but on the level and in the expression that is clothed in the garment of improvisation, and i contend that only the principles underlying these creations are universal to my people - i spoke earlier about the crickets and the rhythm of the little tadpole that floats about in a little pond, or the rhythm of the waves and wind, or in one's life, the wholeness of sound-rhythm, of all that is created cosmically and all that one interprets (cultural) as beings on earth - these are the things that set in motion my thoughts,unfolds the heritage, my heritage. which/ from the (u.s.) north america to those ancient lands of africa and this present day modern africa - that is the lineage of my music - that is a part of the creative music of the improvisers - i humbly strive to create and document my music through this line of heritage with every conscious effort and action i feel the urge that is stronger than any other force a kinship, a realness, and realizing such, a heritage - and it is through this heritage that i find the most vital and creative energy for me as a person.

it is what makes my life complete with all its suffering and all of its pleasures and all that makes life life.

the speaking of the spirits, the essence of the spirit, the realness of the creation, spirit-drum - i feel is the essence of essence of improvisation.here i speak not of the drum physically or anatomically, but the spirit-drum (rhythm).

in the orchestral music of improvisation one can feel and know the presence of this spirit-drum. rhythm. rhythm propels the sounds that are unseparated from rhythm, and rhythm unseparated from sound but the attitude is the spirit- drumrhythm - as i stated in part one(note son my music) i tried to show the relationship in a philosophical sense how the set-ups and the principles underlining the sound-rhythm that takes place in my music and the consideration of space as also rhythm-sound that is incorporated - when rightly seen and felt these principles introduce a totally personal world that is in itself the spirit-drum - rhythm - rhythm. 

"rhythm, according to many africans, existed at the beginning of time and was often thought to be the absolute creator of the worlds and their inhabitants - it is therefore the very essence of the universe, the hidden fluid that runs through all beings - human, animal and vegetable - the magical point of contact and of participation, of man with nature" - i hold this to be the highest in essence in consideration of improvisation.


other
notes part 3

(the equality of all in struments and a few notes on a sound recording, creative music-1 --- and other thoughts)

part 3 deals specifically with the fallacy that if the drum is not present then it is not black music (creative music); with the sound recording, creative music-1, which consists of 6 solo improvisations; and with the sound recording form. first a few misconceptions must be cleared up about the function of certain instruments in creative music. i'm specifically referring to the statements and attitudes of reasoning that hold that the drum is the center of black music. it is not the element but the spirit that is: rhythm. in other words, it is not the center as all evolves out of (as explained in part 2, the spirit-drum) but the center in the sense of the dominant-the controlling factor in the music. this is a misconcepti on as was with the trumpet and saxophone. critics have applied narrow concepts to this improvisational music so that they could easily write about and define it and dictate what is the essence of black music-creative music. the percussion, brasses, strings and any other beaten, plucked or wind blown instruments in improvisational music are equal --- they are all equal in the creation of music, although the improvisers seem not to understand this and continue to roll along with the critics-ideal of himself and creative music. so the "front-line" dictates and controls what's happening or feels that they are the only creative ones along with the drummer (or "solo" and "rhythm section"): and the drummer propels the "solo" in their creations, or so says the critics. (one has to only take note of the unfairness in the documented evidence of creative music. here one can find that only saxophones, trumpets, pianos, and occasionally other instruments have been endowed with the honor of being "leaders" and thus most of the contributions to different periods of development in creative music have always been attributed to one individual, and never more than one at one time --- highly unbalanced procedure.) i refer all those who hold these types of views to the continent of africa to consider the great master improvisers there in ancient and modern times. in this great music of our heritage, any instrument, including the voice, is performed (improvised) in solo (i.e. without accompaniment of drums). in fact if one has noticed, in african classical art music there is a string music, a percussion music, a vocal music, and different music of wind instruments (ivory trumpets, for example). no matter what size the ensembles are, all the instruments are given equal importance, and with that equal importance they are given their autonomy in relationship to time (no unison in time). regarding the orchestras, the same principles hold true. and to come straight across, or into the lands of north america we'll find in the early orchestra and ensemble music of the african-american, the many flourishing-lines of equal independence (importance). one has only to look to fine recorded examples of early ensemble music to realize what i'm saying. for example, louis armstrong and the hot five ensemble. they recorded in chicago during a span of time that ran from november 12, 1925 through july, 1926. now, on none of the sound recorded during that period was there a drum used (allegedly, one of the reasons was because they couldn't record the drums, but what i'm talking about is the actual documented fact of master music without drums, regardless of the circumstances ). although, hear me clear, i'm not saying that the spirit-essence of the drum is not there. i'm saying that all of the instruments are equally important, and hold equal, no matter what setting the music is performed in. now to go to further proof of what i'm talking about, consider "weatherbird". this improvisation was recorded in 1928 and performed by only two improvisers: louis armstrong and earl hines. now this duo music, as you will have noticed if you've ever heard it, does not have drums, but the spirit-essence of the drums is there. the point that i'm trying to make is that when listening, if you listen to an orchestra, ensemble, or a solo, listen seriously to that only. do not listen with some strange outer third ear for something that's not there. in other words, if a solo improvisation is taking place, do not suppose in your mind that you are hearing a solo and plus. that is absolutely an unintelligent approach to music. so i simply say: hear what you are hearing when you are hearing and you will never have illusions of what it is that you are hearing.

© 1997-2011 Ishmael Wadada Leo Smith


http://www.wadadaleosmith.com/pages/edu.html

Academic Course Descriptions

Artist Statement

Through musical reflections I realized that music had a philosophical, theoretical and practical usage in the construction of art objects; and that the creative music language consists of compositional forms (known musical elements) and improvisational forms (unknown musical elements). The composition and improvisation are constructed through musical activities and that special inspired musical moment that the artist/composer/performer wishes to reveal. For fifty years my research and artistic development has been in creating a musical notational language designed with compatible systems to illustrate my artistic expression. In the performance context the ensemble provides the key evidence for the success of the musical works and determines the quality of the composition / improvisation experience. Since 1967, all of my compositions, improvisations and ankhrasmation music for creative musicians employs systems of rhythm-units, melodic / sonic-units, and symbolic-units which are realized in the context of the music score and performance.

Leo Smith , 10.25.09

© 1997-2011 Ishmael Wadada Leo Smith

  
http://www.allaboutjazz.com/a-fireside-chat-with-   wadada-leo-smith-wadada-leo-smith-by-aaj-staff__461.php

 
A Fireside Chat With Wadada Leo Smith
by AAJ STAFF
November 29, 2003

Free jazz denotes an idiom and has little to do with freedom. John Litweiler’s The Freedom Principle chronicles how Leo Smith, born in Leland, Mississippi, a hub for the blues, entered into the service (outspoken of racial conditions in the army), discovered Don Cherry, moved to Chicago, joined the AACM, and developed into a standard for lyrical contrasts and space. And although the word “jazz” has not aged well, perhaps there is hope in the masters like Smith (unedited and in his own words), progressively propelling the music forward, preventing “jazz” from becoming obsolete.

FRED JUNG: How influential has the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) been to the annals of improvised music?


WADADA LEO SMITH: Well, I think it is one of those milestones, where people can not only look back and see that there was a conscious effort to try to control part of the industry, at least the most important parts of it, like creativity and economics. It showed for the first time that you could actually set up a structure in which artists could work in without losing faith and breaking down into some kind of non-communicative zone, which happens to most organizations after seven or eight years. They get lost. The AACM has stood the test of time. It has overcome all of its challenges from inside and outside. It is still a golden idea that could be perfected because it is not perfect.


FJ: You played with Anthony Braxton and Leroy Jenkins in a short-lived trio, the Creative Construction Company.


WLS: That came one day after being in the AACM and knowing Braxton. Braxton said that we should get together and play. At the time, he was living in what was called the Musicians Building in Chicago. A lot of people lived there that played music. So Leroy Jenkins didn’t live far from there and I lived on the near North Side and so we gathered there on Saturday or Sunday afternoons and started playing this music. It sounded so good that we agreed to make a trio out of it that same day. That is how that trio came out. As you know, Fred, when we went to Europe a little bit later, Steve McCall became part of us.

FJ: And the relationship with Braxton has continued for the better part of four decades.

WLS: That is one of the qualities of the AACM. Once you have some kind of intimate musical relationship with one of these guys or women, you have a commitment as an AACM person to really keep that connection and make that music.

FJ: Serendipitously, you studied at Wesleyan, where Braxton would later become a member of the faculty.

WLS: That is right, in the world music department. I was looking for confirmation and corroboration of ideas and certain kinds of notions about music. Wesleyan was the perfect place. It had a good world music department. It had people there from Bali, from Ghana. The head of the music school was teaching Native American music and cultural performance traditions. So it was a good place to go.

FJ: Rastafari was recorded twenty years ago for the Sackville label. Boxholder has since reissued the session, co-lead by Bill Smith.


WLS: It is extremely fresh because systemic music, music of systems, they have a chance to be fresh and new depending on the quality of ideas of the beholder. So it is based around the notion of language being the carrier of information as opposed to styles and attitudes and the way that it has been traditionally constructed. If you have a structure, a systemic base or something, for example, paint, a particular color has a numeric number that represents it symbolically. That same symbolic number for other types of color also are there. So you have this range of transfer of information where it becomes kind of like a language. That keeps it fresh. I know that is a new and very different way to look at it. The idea or notion that this is a system in which one can construct new and creative ideas about how the universe looks presents that freshness.

FJ: During much of the Seventies and early Eighties, you produced music on your own label, Kabell. As a member of the AACM, you had recording opportunities, why did you develop Kabell?

WLS: I started it primarily for documentation purposes. That was the initial thrust of it. That meant that if I felt that I had something a little bit different that I reached or achieved in the music, I would try to go in the studio and record it and place it for sale in a context where there wouldn’t be too many middle people. It was a nice way of trying to show your music in a noncommercial way. It showed what paths you were traveling through. A little bit later, I got the idea of trying to make it much grander and approached different people about making a Kabell series, but most of them were uninterested in that idea. I did four records and one cassette.

FJ: Those recordings are being reissued by Tzadik as part of a box set.

http://www.thewire.co.uk/in-writing/interviews/wadada-leo-smith-uncut

Wadada Leo Smith - uncut

February 2010

The Wire

Read Phil Freeman's unedited transcript of his interview with the avant jazz giant

Phil Freeman: How did you first meet Anthony Braxton, and how did you start working with him?

Wadada Leo Smith: I met him in Chicago. I had been referred to him by another fellow I met in the Army, I guess when they were stationed in Korea or something. I had a phone number, and when I got to Chicago I looked Braxton up and we started immediately making a connection.
What was the common ground, do you think?

The fact that we were both in the AACM, and we were both looking at ways at that time of how to get our music out, because this was 1967 and very little had happened at that time. We had yet to do 3 Compositions of New Jazz; that was later in the year. It was a mutual situation where I understood things he was looking for and he checked out some of the things I was looking for.

I don’t think – I know I wasn’t thinking stylistically at all about any of these kinds of music. When I came to Chicago I had already composed a pretty good body of work and already begun to understand music without metrical progression or modulation. And I was never, ever working in a harmonic sphere where harmonic progression was important. And you look at Braxton, he’s working just the opposite, he was looking at how you make creative music with those connections. And I was not so much interested in that part of it as a way of making music. I always looked at how you make music without all those things everybody has inherited.

A lot of AACM work seems to utilize space and silence more than the aggressive free jazz that came from New York. Can you talk about that?

The piece with the vocals on it and also ‘The Bell,’ those two have the most space. I would say that space was a very important component, still is. Most people have kind of crowded their musical contribution into narrow spaces, but space is still a very important component of my music and a lot of the AACM people. And by space we don’t mean just horizontal space, we’re talking about vertical space and lateral space.

Could you explain that in a little more detail?

Okay, vertical space has to do with the relationship between low and high notes. Not necessarily anything to do with chords, but the intervallic range. And horizontal of course is about linear form, going from section A to section B or from one type of movement to another type of movement. But the lateral one has to do with how you make music that suggests you’re moving upward but also moving forward. That’s the lateral one. That’s a great illusion, just like those illusionists who make you think they’ve vanished into space. They don’t really vanish into space, but the way they’ve concocted the illusion they convince you they’ve vanished. Lateral space does the same thing. At the same time it gives a forward trajectory and an upward one, and if you’re coming from the other direction, a backward trajectory and a downward one. But the most important thing is not necessarily the direction but what happens inside that direction. Most of the music coming out of the evolution of the ’60s into what we have now – every performer or instrumentalist has a responsibility to contribute to that space in both positive and negative ways, and by negative I mean by applying not necessarily the activity of his music but by utilizing silence. Because up until the early ’60s, before the evolution came in, most people were looking at how you make a version of music that has something to do with playing and how you make your contribution within the context of a solo. That’s not a multi-dominant music, that’s music where one line is dominant and every other line is subservient to it or at least plays a role that doesn’t eclipse or intercede against that solo line. It’s important to talk about how one utilizes the form.

The AACM artists seem to have released a lot of solo horn albums – was that something you all discussed as important, and what do you see as the importance of solo releases?

To make solo music, the tradition goes way back. It doesn’t start with us. Before we did it, Monk did a lot of solo music, and James P. Johnson all those piano players. But with the advent of wind instruments…The incentive is this. It’s almost impossible to think about being a complete artist without having this capability of performing solo, in ensemble, and orchestral formations. But the real incentive is that you learn a lot about yourself when you play solo music. And it, by the way, it’s not absent of anything. Solo means just what it says, alone. And usually people say they’ll imagine what the bass would be doing while you’re soloing, and I’m quick to tell them that they were somewhere else. They were not at that performance. Because focusing on a solo requires the same kind of energy as focusing on an ensemble. It’s just that the ensemble gives you a multiplicity of things to look at, while a solo gives you this intense involvement that amounts to the same thing. I’ll give you an example. Five you listen to an ensemble and focus on one instrument from top to bottom of the piece, whether it’s three minutes or five minutes. It’s very difficult. One would find it difficult, because the solo presents the same kind of awareness that the ensemble asks you for.

It can be just as difficult to follow a solo performance as a group performance, but don’t the additional instruments provide a larger context for what the soloist is doing?

It does provide a larger context. But following a solo is just as difficult as following a single instrument within an ensemble. The effort that it requires – it requires a constant focus, whereas with an ensemble you can drift back and forth and go over here and go over there and hear the whole thing. So the solo requires more effort, or just as much effort.

Playing in an ensemble you have this unit [and] you’re only responsible for a portion of the music. Even if you are the ensemble leader or director, you’re still only responsible for a portion of the music as it is being performed. Whereas if you’re a solo, you’re responsible for all of it. So it’s a very different kind of responsility, the burden of putting it out is much larger than playing within an ensemble. There’s very few people that have put out solo records. There have been economically, but I’m talking about within the context of highly developed solo music. I’m not talking about the average guy who gets out of high school or college and feels that he wants to present a solo CD, because he don’t have the money to hire somebody. Playing solo has nothing to do with economical possibilities, it has to do with the material, and what the artists wants to reveal.

In the early ’70s, you started the Kabell label to release your own work – why did you make that move?

Well, essentially the main reason was to try and control the output that I was doing. The other reason was to mark the different types of research I was going through and the way that was being developed. I wanted to document those areas I was exploring at that time. The documentation was a very important part of it. It wasn’t to make money or something like that, although that’s not an impossibility, because money could be made on records at that time.

So the business aspect wasn’t really a big part of your thinking?

I don’t think it plays any part, because for example I could not compete with large record companies. You cannot compete with newspapers and magazines and things like that. But what the artist does is they are able to present their music and make evidence of their own existence on the planet, and that’s a much higher calling than the economic. To me that’s the most important part of it, that you leave a legacy of information whether the times are right for that information or individuals are interested in that information. Some day they will be. And we know that because we can look back through history and find many, many examples of this type of new information that was put down a long time ago and they didn’t have the courage to look at it. Whatever you do, it means something. The Prophet Muhammad said that if all of creation was going to end in a few seconds, if you have a chance, plant a tree.

The writer Isaac Asimov said if he knew he had only a few minutes to live, he would type faster.
Exactly. You don’t stop typing, you work and when the planet goes away you go away with it.

How did the Creative Construction Company arise out of your work with Braxton and Leroy Jenkins?

That group came together out of a concert that was being presented in New York. Braxton and Jenkins and myself had just come back from Europe and someone was trying to present us in New York. That group came together to play that event and wound up playing three events all together, two in New York and one in Boston. That was it. Some groups have the potential of lasting longer and others don’t. I can say this – rarely, if you look at history, do collectives last long. They last for a brief moment. There are of course exceptions like the Modern Jazz Quartet and the Art Ensemble, but there’s not a ton of them.

How did the New Dalta Akhri group form, and why were there relatively few records by the group?

We made Reflectativity and we made Song of Humanity and we made Spirit Catcher and Divine Love and what else. That’s probably the apex of that band. We made a number of documents under the name New Dalta Akrhi or just under the name Leo Smith, but it was the same concept. The concept of that group was to begin to understand the rhythm music concept, which later became part of the Ankhrasmation system. That band quite frankly was the first band that began to introduce a clear idea about systemic music coming from my point of view. It was primarily involved in understanding how to use systems in making music, and it had a pretty good format, but we rehearsed every week, looked at a lot of music. Some of it was performed, some was just rehearsed. One might say that New Dalta Akhri was the first laboratory for what I was looking at for musical languages.
[page break] 

Do you think the loft jazz scene represented a major stylistic change from the avant-garde of the ’60s toward a more introspective music?

I believe there was a change, yeah. I think that if you look at the way the music had evolved, there was a drastic shift coming out of the post ’60s energy music to a much more systemic music, which is what I was looking for and was interested in. Systemic music meaning you had a reduction of energy and an implementation of more elements that were akin to concepts, systems and language. And if you look at the music I produced during that period – Divine Love, for example – the music on that record represented that shift away from the energy field of playing music to the kind of systemic, thematic ways in which you could manifest the creative process.

The biggest problem with the loft music is that it didn’t last long enough, and the people that started the loft scene and participated in the loft scene, they kind of just stopped, and I think they stopped because basically they got a little bit of press and they figured maybe we could do this thing the normal way that other people do it. They should have taken the loft scene as the foundation for building new kinds of institutions, where the music could be played. But that was not achieved. There’s a lot of failure of things that happened in the ’60s that could have made the conditions for music to day much different. But those failures – they didn’t build institutions. And institutions are the only things that really change the environment. If you go back to the 2008 election, if Obama had tried to do the same thing that his predecessors had done and run with the same presence, he would not have won. So he built a different way to run for office. He had a new approach to raising money, building coalitions, and the notion of how you present this idea, like incorporating young people into the process. That had never been done before. So he built a new political system that will become an institution, because he raised so much money. People will build off it. I think we could have done the same thing, and if we had formed any kind of coalition with other parts of the music it would have made a big difference.

You’re a teacher in addition to being a bandleader and many of your groups feature players much younger than yourself, so where is the line between teaching and bandleading, and how permeable is it?

Well, let me say it this way. Every ensemble leader has built a worldview which they take part of. And this worldview, this utopian environment in which you create and develop and present this music, is a perfect laboratory for any kind of new ideas. So the ensemble is the perfect forum for discovery. It’s utopian, it’s run generally by one person and one person’s view of what it is the ensemble should be engaged in, and people work in the context of that. Now in my ensembles, because of the languages and systems we use, every rehearsal is a process in which we try to establish new information and redefine old information – that is, information we already have. So it’s a perfect environment for that. And young people, they are the future no matter how you look at it. And some of us just happen to be older. It’s not really a big deal. But most of the bands I have put together involve people who have their own ensembles, which is one of the requirements to be in my ensemble. Because if you know how to run your own ensemble, you have a clear head about how ensembles function, what the role of individuals in an ensemble is, and how to relate to the music.

The Golden Quartet’s membership changed completely between the first and second albums, yet retained the name. How did the initial lineup come together, and why did it change?

That happens. Look at the Duke Ellington Orchestra. It was called the Duke Ellington Orchestra all the time, and look how many members changed. Lots of them. So that means that the Duke Ellington Orchestra or the Golden Quartet is a concept. It’s an idea about an ensemble, and that idea is fixed in some kind of ways based on the conceptual or spiritual or economic or philosophical views of the person that sets it up. so it can change. When I made the Golden Quartet, when I made the Silver Orchestra, and now I have Organic, I intended all these ensembles to run concurrently with each other and if I need to make changes here or there, I make changes.
[page break] 

What can you tell me about the recording of America, the duo album with Jack DeJohnette? There are relatively few trumpet-drums duo albums out there – how did it come about? Was it recorded in 1979 or more recently?

There’s Don Cherry and Ed Blackwell, which is probably the most famous; there are not many, but I have three. I have one with Gunter “Baby” Sommer, a German guy, I have one with Adam Rudolph, which is hand drumming and percussion, and I have the one with Jack. It’s an unusual format, but musically it’s very rewarding. There’s a lot of space in it. There’s lots of things you can do. You can pull back, you can push forward, it’s a very beautiful format. If you have specific reasons for the ensembles and they take on an entirely different occasion. A possibility for really high achievement. That duet, America, looks at the political aspect of America but it goes back to 1964, and the idea of 1964 is that it was the first time that African-Americans were able to effectively achieve in any of the political parties. Before that we were not in the Democratic or Republican parties. But Fannie Lou Hamer and other courageous people went to Ohio and fought against Humphrey and all those other people. They were smart enough to use the press in their favor, which had never been done before by people speaking for inclusion. So America’s about that, which is a really fascinating story, that 1964 Democratic convention. Fannie Lou Hamer was a Mississippian.

It was originally supposed to be recorded for ECM years ago, right?

Somewhere around in there, but the project itself was only – it never came to fruition, so the music was never written for that ensemble. When this ensemble, when John Zorn and Tzadik decided to put this project out, I immediately started working on the music. Because this project was offered to ECM first, it was offered to Black Saint then, and none of those efforts bore fruit. Black Saint are adventurous, but I think the thing had something to do with economics.

Your new album has a lot of guitar players on the second disc, and obviously you’ve got the Yo Miles group with Henry Kaiser and your work with John Coxon and Spring Heel Jack – what about the combination of trumpet and electric guitar strikes you? Is it something that goes back to R&B, before you started playing jazz?

Most of the musicians I heard when I was younger were guitarists, but more than that, Organic originally had two keyboards, one guitar, one bass, one drummer and trumpet. But the year before that, we did three festivals in Europe, and after that was done I decided I was trying to get a different sound than what I had with the two keyboards. And the sound I ended up with was strings and percussion. So I got two basses, one electric and one acoustic but processed and amplified, the cello and four guitars. Right away that’s seven string instruments. The focus was, yes, what the guitar sounds like, but the ultimate focus was I wanted to create a string ensemble, or an ensemble where strings dominated, with just two outside instruments that have a different character, the drums and me. So I chose guitar players that are very unique and individual. Michael Gregory, there’s nobody that sounds like him. Brandon Ross, an entirely different way of playing guitar. Nels Cline, just fascinating the way he makes elements that sound rockish but aren’t really rockish, that sound jazz but aren’t really jazz. And I bring in my grandson Lamar on two pieces, which gives us a four-guitar format.

How did the Yo Miles group come together? During the 1970s you were doing something very different from that, so what about Miles Davis’s 1970s material interested you?

What made it interesting to me was the possibility of doing it in a way that it would be different. And by different I mean that we would try to create real music around the concepts and systems utilized by that Miles electric band. And when you do that you come up with something different than a project that’s trying to sound like the older band did and use the same principles. We used the same themes but with a much freer concept than Miles or anybody else used at that time. What’s interesting about the Yo Miles band is that it didn’t have too much of a performance life. It played maybe four times in its whole career and recorded three double records. Six records, three doubles. So we have more records than we actually had live performances. And I think that had great potential for performances, but could never get together for performances. We had several offers in Europe and a couple of places in America, but never played anywhere else but in San Francisco. That was the reason that band folded, was that it never played anywhere.

It seems like with each release there were more originals and fewer interpretations.

Basically the first record had only one original, and those interludes that I did were all original music. And the second and third were made in four days, at one of those recording live-in places in the Bay Area, we made a CD a day basically. I went there with a notebook full of music because I had just gotten through recording with Thomas Mapfumo, and Kaiser was on that as well, and I went directly from there, came home, took a short break and was off on this other journey. So when I went up to record I carried a notebook full of music. We exhausted the notebook. We exhausted the time.
[page break] 

What kind of connection do you feel with Miles Davis’s playing and style?

The thing you have to understand about Miles Davis is that his music, meaning his trumpet playing and also his compositions and the way he ran the ensemble was entirely different from what had taken place before on the planet. He brought more of a fresh awareness inside the music than most people did. And he also experimented in a different way than, say, Ornette Coleman or Cecil Taylor. His experimentation went the other way. He experimented with the addition of modern, newly discovered instruments like the Fender Rhodes and different kinds of piano things that were being invented at the time, that Herbie and those guys played. So his musical evolution was much larger than most people’s, and that’s kind of understated.

Speaking of experiments, tell me about Luminous Axis, the album you did with the laptops.

Basically it had laptops and I think three duets with Ikue Mori and I. But, see, my idea of electronic music is very different from most. For example, most of the electronic music out there that’s being produced and performed by people who build circuitry and patch these things through. I gave everyone scores that I call Ankhrasmation scores. Those connected computers, performers and me – instrumental performers like drums and trumpet – and that connection made it so that the ensemble, the practice of the computer artist was completely reversed, completely changed. It brought them into a visual contact with another object and that object had to be referenced and created in a certain way. It’s useful to find other areas of working in than you’re used to. So Luminous Axis was a very important project for me. It gave me the chance to make one composition, and that’s what it is, one composition that has I forget how many panels, something like 12 or 14 panels, where it was distributed throughout the ensemble in different ways. Sometimes you use the same score to create different music. So I recorded all this stuff and then in the post-production I did it exactly like a filmmaker would do. I reviewed all the material, I made a score for myself how I was gonna organize it and then I set about constructing the piece. It’s a piece that’s constructed by and large in post-production.

How would you compare that to working with Spring Heel Jack?

Essentially, working with Spring Heel Jack, they had stopped the bass/drum/guitar/computer music they had been doing, they had moved into connecting with improvisers. That’s how they connected with me.

Was it easy to communicate concepts, given the difference in your background and theirs?

I don’t know exactly how they saw it, but for me, I don’t believe that musicians can be made. Don Cherry took a lot of amateurs and made great music from it. Background, maybe it’s important in some contexts, but not always. Spring Heel Jack, the fist one and the second one we did, it’s all based around improvisation. Some of the material would be pre-taped, like there would be a soundtrack we’d listen to and play over, but it was all improvisation. There were no notes to learn or stuff like that. But the experience was good. I enjoyed working with Jon and Ashley. In fact, that whole scene of different British players, I enjoyed it.

Obviously you’ve had a very productive relationship with John Zorn and Tzadik – what can you say about that? How do you decide whether a project is suited to Tzadik or to Pi or to Cuneiform?

Right now I’m mostly working with Cuneiform, and the reason is there, it’s a much… I’m able to maintain the masters, to control and keep them, it’s leased to them, and with Pi, I haven’t worked with Pi in quite a few years. Tzadik has a 50 percent profit sharing relationship, which is a much different idea than control of the product. It’s kind of a quasi-partnership. This is a real interest for me, control of the product and leasing it. Cuneiform, these guys work very hard. They’re very aggressive in getting their products out there, and I like the way they work.

Would you say there’s a core philosophy behind your music – something that’s a common factor throughout your discography?

No matter what instrumentation you use, the whole layout of one’s thinking musically involves the notion of a sense of bringing out everything that’s in you. And in my philosophy, if you think of the idea of non-metrics, the idea of breaking every possible notion of sound and configuration into two ways of looking at sound. One is as a long sound and a short sound, these are like the physical characteristics of how I think about music. For example, if I have a figure that has four short sounds in it and one long sound, I can bracket that sound in a framework that says five sounds per grouping. Now what that gives me is the ability, whether I’ve got two people in the ensemble or ten, it gives me the possibility of two different ways of expressing it or ten different ways, and still having it come out right. So that’s one of the things, is to break it down so it has two kinds of notions about duration or articulation – it’s long or short sounds. And out of that simplification, I can make stuff either longer or shorter or faster. So that’s a nice beginning way of how to think about it.
[page break] 

Talk to me about “The Burning of Stones,” the track from Spirit Catcher with the harps.

The first thing that was fascinating for me about that was the notion of threes. If you look back at Spirit Catcher and Divine Love, they’re like months apart. And on Divine Love there’s a piece for three muted trumpets. Lester Bowie, Kenny Wheeler and I play on it. And this piece was written right around the same time, either just before or just after. But the three harp idea – I wanted to make it so that three harps gives me the possibility of having pulse in the rhythms, where whatever pitch they play, because you have to pluck the harps the same way as striking a drum, because there’s three of them I have three levels of rhythmic stuff crossing each other. And depending on the beginning and the end of the figure, I have this notion of contact in short and long relationships. Let’s say one harp has six notes in a figure, the next harp has three, the last harp has nine. And each one as they start the figure, depending how it lines up, one may be before the other one or may be going afterward. So I’ve got three crossing figures. And the sound was the other implication. What does the harp sound like? Not like a piano, not like a guitar, not like anything. So to have three of them, I’ve got this massive flow of figures crossing each other, to me that was a fascinating point. And when you look across the literature in Western music, you don’t find pieces for three harps. Neither do you find pieces for three trumpets, at least not at that time in the 1970s. There was a guy who had a trumpet piece for four trumpets but they were using a trumpet mute, not a Harmon mute. So when I looked across for any kind of similar reference for those kinds of instrumentation, I didn’t find them. And the other thing that makes both of these pieces so wonderful for me is that the trumpet parts for both of them are completely improvised. The three trumpets, they’re not free improvisation, but they’re improvised based around my Ankhrasmation language. The whole piece is based around my Ankhrasmation figures. And with the three-harp piece, there’s no line written for the trumpet. The trumpet simply plays its material over the tops of those bars and page that the harps are playing on. The three-harp piece, if you listen to [both takes] back to back you can hear how different they turn out to be. The harp music is the same, but the emphasis and how it flows has changed from the other piece and their attacks also change. I was surprised by that. Not in a bad way, in a good way. The harp parts are completely notated, so you would think they would come out roughly the same, at least close, but they come out with the attacks all different. We don’t count ’em one-two-ready-go. There’s no count-in. When I say non-metrical, that means that you don’t ever have to count either collectively as one count equals one, you count your own stuff in the context of the way you play it based on the figures and not based on a centralized count or a centralized beat. That’s because of the configuration, and you can feel quite different energies on there, if it’s faster or slower or the next version.

What do you see as the common threads linking the two discs of your new album?

I deliberately paired them in the way I did. “South Central L.A.” I put last on the quintet disc, and first on CD Two, with Organic. The reason I did that is I wanted to make it a complete forced issue regarding the listener. So that if I did have a serious listener that would sit down one day and listen to the first CD from beginning to end, and start immediately with the second CD, and listen to that to the end, if I had a serious listener who brought to that project the clear intent of finding out what I meant as a composer and performer, they would meet those two pieces back to back. Because when you listen to it one day, and then the next day, those two pieces – you know, it’s the same piece but it doesn’t make the impact it would if you listened back to back. And the same thing if you listen to the ensembles. The ensembles are very important. The quintet and then the septet/octet, because I fluctuate between seven and eight players. That makes the difference. Organic is essentially strings, and electric strings at that, and the other ensemble is more classic with strings, bass, wind instrument and drums, you see. So the impact would be swiftly felt if one did that. And when I did it, I was amazed how different the two ensembles sounded and how different the music felt from each one. For example, in Organic playing the same piece, it felt like it had so much depth in terms of the width of the sound. If you could stand the sound on its side it would go from the floor to the roof of the house. And all the space between the floor and the roof is filled in. That amazed me, and I thought that was wonderful. And when I listened to the quintet, if you placed it on its side, it would have that same kind of vertical depth but not be completely filled in. It has more vertical space in it, and things move across either singly, like one instrument makes its way through, or instruments pop up and down in there. Whereas with Organic, it’s just a grid that all the space is filled and every instrument is not competing but utilizing that grid as if they were the only instrument in the grid.

Yeah, there are moments that are pretty overwhelming.

It is overwhelming in a lot of ways, because when you’ve got three or four guitars and they’re like Michael Gregory and Brandon Ross and Nels Cline and Lamar Smith, when you’ve got them in there, you say wow, and then you think you’ve been amazed, but then you’ve got Skuli [Severinssen] and John Lindberg and Okkyung Lee. And then you have to say ‘Wow, this string ensemble is nothing.’ And then you think you’ve reached the peak of your realization, and you still have left out the drumming. And that smashes you right up against the wall with patterns that’s got space in between them, looped together, making some kind of a notion about patterns but not straight-out patterns. So it does have an overwhelming effect, for me as well.
[page break] 


How would you describe your approach to rhythm, generally?

The major question is, since the recording ‘The Bell,’ I discovered that rhythm could be organized as proportional and not metrical. And what I found out, this goes back to that thing about long and short, I found that if I could group a set of figures into an idea of long and short, and I had six sets of them which turned out to be twelve different kinds of rhythms, and then I organized a relationship between each set, between a single set and between each of a set, that I had stepped on something that would be profoundly useful. ‘The Bell’ was composed on a Saturday morning at my house in Chicago, and later that day at the AACM building where we would often meet and perform and discuss, I had the opportunity of putting it into practice to see how it worked. And I didn’t know at the time they were rhythm units or that it would have such an impact on my music, I simply knew that I was struggling hard to find a way how to verbally contextualize what I was trying to do in these figures. And the rhythm units gave me that idea. So this long and short – let’s say each set has a long-short relationship out of all six of them. And the first one, the first figure in there which is the white one with the stem coming from the left side and the beam going over the bar to the right, that one is the long relationship, and you see that connection in all six of the sets. And the second part of the rhythm unit is the black note head with the stem coming up from the left, beam moving across to the right. That’s also in every set but with some other graphic figure that precedes them, same with the white one, so that each set looks the same but has [something] on them. The long note, whenever it’s performed in an actual piece of music, you always hear silence between. And that silence in between equals the relative value of how long that note was before. If it was two beats, you can give something like two beats of silence. You’re not dealing with beats, but I use that as a way of explanation. And then the second one is the same thing, but the silence is shorter. So each unit has an a and a b part to it. So what you end up with is a long unit sounding, a silence unit in between, another long unit sounding that’s roughly half what the first unit was, and then a space of silence equivalent to that half. So what you end up articulating physically is the a and b part of the unit, and the other part is imaginary, the long silence and the short silence. Four components being used in each unit. Two silent as extra figures. So that was the key. And then the second key is the performers never ever have to memorize what the noise-silence relationship is in any given rhythm unit, or remember which figure was the longest when they played it last. Because whenever you come to a rhythm unit figure in that piece of music I composed, its relationship is always long and short. So that means you can keep the creative impulse in you while playing without breaking your creative strand to figure out was the last one long or short. That’s not the issue. If a new unit comes up and there’s two of them or three of them together, or just one more new one, you’re gonna play it with the idea that it’s either long or short.

I was on a press conference with Max Roach maybe 33-35 years ago in Italy, and a couple of other guys like Reggie Workman was on there, and I was being asked about this rhythm units concept and Ankhrasmation and I talked about it, and Max Roach got excited about it when I showed him what the rhythm units looked like. At that time they looked like eighth notes, regular Western eighth notes, but when I began to teach it I came into too much conflict with people trying to play them as regular eighth notes, so I completely changed them. I changed them to look like they were a white note head with a stem coming from the left side, or a black note head with the stem coming from the left side and the beam going toward the right. So Max Roach got really excited and said ‘Wow, this is exactly the way you make a new system by starting with eighth notes.’ And he was referring to the way bebop was constructed. And I had often thought of bebop as being eighth-note music. And if you look at a lot of the scores coming out of that genre, or if you look at Anthony Braxton’s quartets that had the swing idiom, you see the same thing about this notion of bebop being an eighth-note music. So he said I was on the right trail, which excited me, that someone like Max Roach who was a rhythm master, would think that my Ankhrasmation rhythm music idea was the right direction.

You don’t seem to think much about conventional harmony – you seem to achieve harmonic effects more through instrumentation. Is that right?

I don’t deal with harmony. I deal with sound. A group of notes that are stacked on top of each other, I call them vertical sounds. I rarely use the notion of chords, because I associate chords with harmony. So I call ’em vertical stacks and the logical reason for the definition comes out of Roscoe Mitchell’s ideas about sound. That was a message to the entire creative music community. It said that now that we had reached a stage past Ornette and Albert and Don Ayler and those fantastic guys, Pharoah Sanders and Cecil Taylor, we had now entered into an area of sound. And that record, Sound, if anybody listens to it you can see that there’s a real beautiful melody that’s voiced in several orchestrations of the instruments that precedes sound, but once they reach the space for improvisation, the sound is manipulated, the artist is asked to manipulate the sound that’s inherent within the instrument. And varying levels of success are achieved, but the truth is it generated for me specifically, because I consider myself a deep and serious listener, I saw that Sound really gave us a pure identity as a community to talk about what we were doing and to make a distinction from noise. In Sound you still maintain the possibility to have control over the incidence of non-related pitches that you’re dealing with, and you can shape and bend them any kind of way. And if you look at the tradition of jazz or creative music, it’s always been an expression of the uniqueness of sound. Every artist according to Willie ‘The Lion’ Smith, the moment they strike the first sound, even if you can’t see that person, you can identify who that person is by the way they sound. So I started thinking not about harmonics after running across that piece of Mitchell’s and being somewhat associated with them. I associated that idea of sound as a good way in which we could tell what I was trying to do and all the guys in the AACM. Most of them were not involved just in harmony, though some of them were harmonically oriented. Because you could not really – I don’t believe you could place all those guys in the narrow frame we call harmony. And even guys who use a harmonic notions, like Henry Threadgill, who has his intervallic relationships, it’s entirely different than the practice of harmony, or Braxton, who has his cell unit concept, it’s entirely different than harmony. Or my Ankhrasmation concept. Those are three ideas right there if you place in any kind of conference anywhere in the world will open up a tunnel of light that’s almost to the point of blindness for people who think about how you make art with sound.

By Wadada Leo Smith & Phil Freeman

Featured in Issue 312

February 2010 

http://www.wadadaleosmith.com/pages/interviews_eng_Philly.html

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JAZZ REVIEW
Golden Age
Wadada Leo Smith on  how far AACM - and society - have come.
by Shaun Brady
Philidelphia City Paper
Dec. 1, 2005 

When the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians formed 40 years ago, it was conceived around notions of freedom that extended beyond the justly celebrated improvisational ideas expressed through its music. "We wanted to change ourselves" says Wadada Leo Smith. "And then we wanted to change our society."

Smith was a, part of the organization virtually from the beginning, joining in 1967 at the behest of saxophonist Roscoe Mitchell. The trumpeter moved to Chicago, the AACM's headquarters, after a stint in the Army, not wanting to return to Mississippi or any where in the South.

Musically, Smith had already been progressing along similar lines, his ears having been opened by Ornette Coleman's early albums. But he cites Miles Davis' Kind of Blue as the precursor to the AACM's experiments. Miles, according to Smith, "reduced all of the crap that bebop had put into the music, and made it so that you could actually articulate ideas as opposed to technique. Listen to any bebop player, Charlie Parker straight on across, you'll find that they have more of an exhibitionist approach to ideas."

But while the AACM clearly has been successful in advancing its antecedents' musical ideas, Smith faults the group for failing to achieve its larger social goals.., He sees many of the problems they faced at the - group's inception still extant, noting that in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, the media was full of "smart, intelligent, bright newsmen and women calling African-Americans fucking refugees. So I think you can see from that line, from slavery to Reconstruction straight on through, you still have a social structure that does not admit acceptance for this large segment of the population in America. We're not accepted, we're never going to be accepted in this particular structure. After 40O years, who's kidding themselves about that?"

The main problem, in Smith's opinion, is that the AACM has never found a consistent way to develop wealth. While it is technically still an active organization, its members are scattered geographically and, outside of the occasional concert appearance, do not maintain much communication.

"What would help the AACM is if somebody like Barry Bonds or Shaquille O'Neal or Tiger Woods would drop about $40 million into the goddamn bucket and build an AACM institution for the Arts. Because that's what it takes. Checkout the Spielbergs and people like that. They don't just build businesses, sneaker shops and restaurants and movies. They build institutions. Institutions are places where you develop knowledge, where you develop wealth, where you invent stuff, where you treat illness through research."

To that end, albeit on a much smaller scale, Smith refers to any ensemble he leads as a "common research team." (His current team is the second version of his Golden Quartet, featuring pianist Vijay Iyer, bassist John Lindberg and drummer Ronald Shannon Jackson.) Like several of the AACM composers - most notably Anthony Braxton, with whom he co-founded the Creative Construction Company trio in the late 1960s - Smith's compositions are system- or language-based, providing a complex structure for improvisation. But, he insists, an audience need not understand the system to appreciate the music. "Baseball is a very complex sport, a really intellectual sport, and it has lots of planes that no one really understands except those guys out there playing baseball. But we appreciate the hell out of baseball." 

According to Smith, an audience sufficiently open to reflection can be changed by a musical event. He points to the actual physical effects of music on an environment as effecting a tangible transformation. Writ large, this effect can create the desired cultural change.

'The social sphere is waiting there to be changed" or bad, by whoever takes the initiative. The AACM is a positive thing, and so is art. If we didn't have art, our society would've collapsed a long time ago. And if there was not worldwide art, then I think we would have some other species talking about when Earth was."
 
( s_brady@citypaper.net)

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© 1997-2011 Ishmael Wadada Leo Smith

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P r e s s   Q u o t e s   (click for full reviews below)
"Leo Smith is a remarkable young trumpet player and percussionist..."
--- Peter Occhiogrosso, Soho Weekly News

"Leo Smith is a trumpeter and composer at the forefront of the
New Creative Music..."
--- Bob Ness, Down Beat

"Leo Smith is the poet of the AACM."
--- Bob Blumenthal, Down Beat

"Leo Smith is one of the most vital musicians on the planet today ... To say that Smith is a highly original player would be an understatement."
--- Bill Shoemaker, Coda

"Smith is a player of great gifts..."
--- David Skiles, Coda

"Smith's trumpet mastery is unquestionable..."
--- Litweiler, Down Beat

"Smith's horn style is saturated with the history of the modern jazz trumpet... There is much of Miles Davis in Smith's playing of the "silences"... and there are deep shades of Fats Navarro in Smith's essentially "melodic", lyrical, even "classical" technique which remains firmly grounded in traditional ideas of tonal "beauty".
--- Thomas Albright., San Francisco Chronicle

"Mr. Smith is a careful improvisor... in this idiom (shifting instrumental colors and thematically oriented improvisations) Mr. Smith has few peers..."
--- Robert Palmer, New York Times

"There is a remarkable cleanliness to Smith's music."
--- Gary Giddens, Village Voice

"....long arching phrases flow from Smith's horn..."
--- Staples, Down Beat
 
"... inspiration is the function of the hero; and Leo Smith is a hero of American Music."
--- Bill Shoemaker
 
"Equally heavy, though much more rewarding, was the solo trumpet set by Wadada Leo Smith. He has such a commanding mastery of delicate forms that the organic waves of sound he created turned everyone's heads inside out. During his two sets, the big room took on the feel of a religious retreat, and rivers of karmic goodness flowed like the purest honey."
--- BENOIT CHAPUT & BYRON COLEY, The Wire 

"It worked especially well when, for the final work, the great improv trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith blazed his way through his Tao-Njia with the ensemble in hot pursuit: sinuous, smoky waves of sound freely bending, darting off in immaculately controlled explosions ending (as doesn't always happen in new music) far too soon against the audience's hopes." --- Alan Rich, LA Weekly

"As usual, Smith surrounds his carefully measured melodic statements with the judicious use of silence. Few trumpeters of the modern era have equaled his seamless marriage of lyricism, especially when he uses a mute. and extended technique - the sour smears, blubbery effects - sometimes combined in the same phrase. He uses electronics to alter his sere tone, thickening his striated cries or enhancing their brittleness."
--- Peter Margasak, Downbeat 

"Leo Smith's concert was one of the L.A. area's finest jazz events that year, ... Electro-acoustic timbres and shifting relationships of structure and improvisation conspired toward a refreshing new entity in the jazz scene, with echoes of '70s Miles electric-jazz voodoo, AACM ideals and something new and personal."
--- Josef Woodard, Jazz Times

"Smith is working at his highest level since the mid '70s. This quartet - with its combination of maturity, craftsmanship, and sense of adventure - is the perfect band to realize Smith's deepening vision."
--- Ed Hazell, Boston Globe

"Smith, in his 60s, is not only as inventive and adventurous as he was when he was a younger player, but his creativity and ability to direct a band into new territory is actually farther reaching than ever before. This is brilliant work."
--- Thom Jurek, All Music.com

"Wadada Leo Smith is best known as a trumpeter with a huge reach, a singular sound thinker whose interrogating approach to the instrument - blowing into the bell, playing with just the mouthpiece, building in the sound of the valves - has pushed the instrument into whole new areas."
--- David Kennan, Sunday Herald

"Smith elicits a symphony of sounds from his trumpet."
--- Steve Greenlee, jazztimes.com 

"Wadada Leo Smith is consistently adventurous trumpeter who has stuck to playing avant-garde jazz throughout his career."
--- Scott Yanow, allmusic.com 

"Wadada Leo Smith spans everything. He is lyrical, intense, soaring, powerful, meditative, hard, soft, deep ... and offering lots of space to the other players."
--- Stef Gijsells, freejazzblogspot.com

"A venerable vanguard rebel for four decades, trumpeter/composer Wadada Leo Smith shows his cutting-edge artistry remains razor sharp on this disc graced with crackling technique, free expression and passion for the beautiful and the spiritual."
--- Owen McNally, The Hartford Courant

"Smith makes his trumpet a clarion call for change."
--- Jerry D'Souza, allaboutjazz.com

please visit CD release pages
and ensemble pages for more reviews

Downbeat Magazine Review 
"Wisdom in Time" - Wadada Leo Smith & Günter Baby Sommer
by Peter Margasak
July 2007

New York Times Review of Golden Quartet Performance
Wadada Leo Smith
and Alan Kushan
Merkin Concert Hall
by Nate Chinen
Saturday December 3, 2005




THE WIRE
SUONI PER Il POPOLO 
 
LA SA LA ROSSA/ CASA DEL POPOLO
MONTREAL, CANADA
BY BENOIT CHAPUT & BYRON COLEY

Montreal's Suoni Per Il Popolo festival is different from many others in that it was not initially conceived as a jazz festival. Programmed to take up almost the entire month of June, at one large venue (Sala) and one small one (Casa), the invited artists have always been more a function of the promoters' wide-ranging taste for liberation than anything doctrinaire. There's also a manifest commitment to presenting new (sometimes unlikely) pairings, with results ranging from the spectacular to the disastrous. But those are the rewards and punishments of running an aesthetically free festival. Friction is a natural byproduct.
No reason to dwell on the dysfunctional couplings, except for the Peter Brotzmann & Sam Shalabi duet, which was one of the festival's most hotly anticipated nights. Multi-instrumentalist Shalabi was playing electric guitar, Brotzmann had his usual complement of woodwinds. The night before, Brotzmann had played a great, openly communicative set with drummer Nasheet Waits. Waits seemed too deep into an Art Blakey African Beat mode and the whole thing clicked. Consequently, tongues were damp with anticipation for the next night. But from the start, Shalabi and Brotzmann cohered far less than hoped. Shalabi's amp blew up and, following a break, things went further awry. The replacement amp was quite a bit louder than the first, and it was pointed directly at Brotzmann. So when Shalabi started channeling Rudolph Grey, Brotzmann was sonically swamped. Tension built for a while, then communication seemed to completely break down, and Brotzmann left the stage abruptly. Hard to figure out exactly what transpired, but it was a real disappointment, since the parts of their collaboration that did cohere were incredible. 

Equally heavy, though much more rewarding, was the solo trumpet set by Wadada Leo Smith. The sound was extremely minimal and quiet. Throughout, Smith looked as cool as a beatific university professor and as concentrated as a star cluster. He has such a commanding mastery of delicate forms that the organic waves of sound he created turned everyone's heads inside out. During his two sets, the big room took on the feel of a religious retreat, and rivers of karmic goodness flowed like the purest honey.



Second Thoughts
by Alan Rich -
LA Weekly, November 1-7, 1996

You could not mistake last week's California EAR Unit program, opening the Monday Evening Concerts series at the County Museum, for anything out of the convoluted worlds of Ives or Mahler, yet the element of eclecticism was an important motivating force here as well. The essence of pop -jazz, improv, even a ballad or two - provided much of the coloration in five large-scale works meant to be heard in a concert context (i.e., respectful silence, with applause only at the end). Some of it worked.

It worked especially well when, for the final work, the great improv trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith blazed his way through his Tao-Njia with the ensemble in hot pursuit: sinuous, smoky waves of sound freely bending, darting off in immaculately controlled explosions ending (as doesn't always happen in new music) far too soon against the audience's hopes.

A Lot of Night Music
by Alan Rich -
LA Weekly, March 28 - April 3,1997

Monday, March 17. The CalArts contingent took over tonight's Green Umbrella concert at the Japan America Theater as part of the school's annual springtime new-music festival. I can remember earlier festivals - from around 1978, say - as genuinely horizon- expanding events, gatherings of worldwide innovators with new and challenging definitions of what music is all about. John Cage showed up, and Morty Feldman and Iannis Xenakis; for a couple of weeks each year we all felt suspended over a precipice. Has that spirit truly died? Tonight we had composers pushing notes around, justifying themselves by proclaiming alliances with grand bygone philosophies; the crackle of dry bones resounded through the hall. And then, in the last piece, Leo Wadada Smith's Nur; Luminous: Light Upon Light, a roomful of reawakened hearers followed Bert Turetzky's solo double bass down a long, resonant corridor, and at the end the solo oboe of Allan Vogel rose like a shaft of clear light and traced a jazz tune, pure and beautiful. We had waited through two hours in the gloomy reaches of other people's solemn, self-congratulatory note spinning in hopes for this kind of light at the end. There, finally, it was.

http://www.wadadaleosmith.com/pages/interviews_eng_3.html#profile 

more english interviews and articles

Jazz meets Genji in 'Heart Reflections'
TOKYO TAKES NOTE

 
Peter Serafin - The Japan Times, 8. 3. 93

In the Western world certain literary classics, such as the work of Homer, Shakespeare and Greek mythology, provide bedrock touchstones for the entire culture. Everyone studies them in school. They're part of the body of knowledge that any educated person in the society would have at least a passing familiarity with. Sometimes modern stories are taken directly from those earlier classics as "Romeo and Juliet" begat "West Side Story." In Japan the Genji stories serve a similar function as literary and cultural benchmarks.

Wadada Leo Smith is an American jazz musician (trumpet , flugelhorn, bamboo flute, koto, percussion instruments) and musicologist who is currently adapting a classic story of the Heike and Genji people for a modern dramatic music composition. He was granted a three month fellowship by the Asian Cultural Council and came to Japan with the intention of finally writing this piece, one he'd been considering for the past 20 years. He has been a professor of music at several universities in the U.S. since 1975 and currently teaches at Bard College in New York State. Beginning next fall he will be joining the faculty of the Jazz and African American Music Program at the California Institute of the Arts as the first holder of the new Dizzy Gillespie Chair.

In addition, he has held lectureships and residencies at universities and institutions throughout the world. He has performed at quite a few international music festivals and concert venues (including Tokyo's Casals Hall and New York's Carnegie Hall) and has composed works for the stage, orchestra, solo performers and instrumental ensembles. He also won the Downbeat Magazine 28th Annual Jazz Critics Poll in the trumpet category in 1981.

He calls this new work "Heart Reflections,' a full - length composition for trumpet, shamisen, koto, drums, voice and dance. We had the opportunity to talk after a performance last week,in a small Yokohama jazz club.

"I call it 'creative world jazz,' he said about his music. "It represents a certain historical experience that Afro-Americans had in America, and as a result of that it has influenced the entire world. "

Right now this work-in-progress has its roots in jazz, but strives to incorporate that form into something more. The performance that night featured Leo on trumpet and koto, Michiro Sato on shamisen and Yoshizaburo Toyosumi on drums. In future versions it will be augmented with two dancers, as well as singers and poets who will sing and recite in a multitude of languages.

The entire performance that night was improvised, with the other players taking their cues from Leo's trumpet, but in the final piece .there will be a written score allowing for what he calls "symbological improvisation," different from either "structured" or "free" improvisation. He's also using nontraditional "free scales" to play the music.

My first impression was that the players that night were creating the soundtrack of some long-forgotten ritual. I was getting lost in the esoteric musical, theory of it all, so Leo attempted to clarify his ideas:

"I have been researching the great history of Noh and have found its tradition to be a profound vehicle for delivering a spiritual message of significant weight in that it offers, through the combining of dance, song, music and drama, a unique form expressing the realms of the supernatural and spirituality."

I asked him what he hoped to accomplish with the composition. "The purpose of music is to quiet man's soul so he self so he can hear what the higher self inside is talking about. That's what perfection is - it's not outside.

Leo hopes to complete the entire work by next month. It will debut in Japan next March with the full compliment of musicians, dancers, singers and poets for a full-length piece. He is currently seeking a few additional performers: a native speaker of one of the languages of the Indian subcontinent (he wants to juxtapose the sounds of that language with the Japanese and English in the piece), and a Zulu dancer to contrast those movements with those of the Japanese dancer.

For those who would like to see this work as it progresses, the performance schedule is: Tonight at Club Jamaica in Sapporo (a solo performance by Leo Smith (tel.-Oll-251-8412); Aug. 21 in Hiroshima and Aug. 22 in Shikoku (0462-32-2394); Aug. 31 at Yurakucho Asahi Hall in Tokyo and Sept. 3 at Shin Yokohama Station (03-3472-4679).

 

http://www.npr.org/sections/ablogsupreme/2010/11/16/131366498/5-expansive-wadada-leo-smith-recordings-picked-by-vijay-iyer

Music Articles

5 Expansive Wadada Leo Smith Recordings, Picked By Vijay Iyer

November 17, 2010

by Vijay Iyer 

This Saturday, Nov. 20, Wadada Leo Smith brings his Golden Quartet to the Library of Congress' Whittall Pavilion in Washington, D.C. We asked bandmate and pianist Vijay Iyer, whose recent Solo album is very much worth your time, to list his favorite Smith recordings, which span more than 30 years. — Ed. 

Wadada Leo Smith.

Scott Groller 

 

It's a great honor to present a handful of tracks by my hero and friend, the composer and trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith.

I first heard about Smith in the early 1990s, when I was starting to learn about the artists of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. I'd read an interview with Anthony Braxton in which he spoke of Smith in the most superlative terms imaginable. Because of this, I got my hands on a classic album by saxophonist Frank Lowe, The Flam (1975), featuring one Leo Smith. I put it on, eager to hear this genius of the trumpet. I was expecting some flashy post-Freddie Hubbard stylings, maybe — but instead I heard great silences, toneless columns of air, long tones that cut diagonally across the hubbub of the ensemble. I felt the same way I'd felt when I'd first heard Thelonious Monk eight years earlier: All I could do was ask, "Is this legal? Is this even music? Does he know something that no one else knows?"

The answer is yes. And it's a good feeling when music can lead you to the brink of your own understanding and still sound beautiful, true and ripe with significance.

5 Expansive Wadada Leo Smith Recordings

Divine Love (Excerpt)

• Artist: Wadada Leo Smith
• From: Divine Love

This is a lovely, delicately unfolding and mysterious suite. The particular way in which sound, space, gesture, composition and improvisation entwine on this piece provides an excellent exposition of Smith's creative language. Released on Manfred Eicher's famous label ECM, it's a testament to Smith's influence that the label's name was his idea -- an acronym for "Editions of Contemporary Music."

Divine Love is available from ECM Records.

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Masimba/Strength to Overcome

• Artist: Thomas Mapfumo & Wadada Leo Smith
• From: Dreams & Secrets

Dreams and Secrets is a beautiful collaboration with the legendary Zimbabwean singer-activist Thomas Mapfumo. The ability to address political struggles in music with grace and power is something the two artists have in common.  I love the way Smith's shimmering trumpet glides across the mbira textures.

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Caravans of Winter and Summer (Excerpt)

• Artist: Wadada Leo Smith
• From: Luminous Axis

An incredible duet with one of the doyennes of electronic music, laptop artist Ikue Mori. I believe this piece deals with Smith's Ankhrasmation system, which is a compositional language he developed using multidimensional visual symbols as stimuli for improvisation. The word combines the Egyptian word for "vital life force" ("Ankh"), the Amharic word for "head" or "father" ("Ras") and a universal word for mother: "Ma." Smith has said that Mori has dealt with the language of Ankhrasmation with more depth and rigor than anyone else with whom he's worked.

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Rosa Parks (Excerpt)

• Artist: Wadada Leo Smith
• From: Tabligh

Wadada Leo Smith's Golden Quartet (captured here in 2005 during its final performance with its previous drummer, powerhouse Ronald Shannon Jackson) has enjoyed many exciting developments in the last several years. Wadada's prolific compositional output for this ensemble has drawn particular inspiration from the history of the civil-rights struggle. "Rosa Parks" was the beginning of a massive cycle of civil-rights-themed works for the quartet, which could now fill four albums (and I hope they soon will). I feel immensely privileged to take part in this project.

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South Central L.A. Kulture (Excerpt)

• Artist: Wadada Leo Smith
• From: Spiritual Dimensions

Smith's devastating slabs of sound slide across electric bassist Skuli Sverrisson's oceanic drone, cellist Okkyung Lee's meticulous arco scribbles, and the hue and cry of four guitarists, including the leader's 12-year-old grandson. The majestic, roiling funk of this album is the sonic trace of bodies in action; the music of a multitude.

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Wadada Leo Smith is a wise man with much to teach us. I often return to this clip from the Golden Quartet concert film Eclipse:

The artist is the consciousness of society… but musicians' role is very special. It's a way of making an example of the perfect state of being for the observer, causing, if it's successful, the observer to forget just for a moment that there is anywhere else existing except that moment that they're engaged in, and to eclipse everything that was happening to them before they began that process of being the observer, or being involved in/engaged between art and music and listening… and to transform that life in just an instant, so that when they go back to the routine part of living, they carry with them a little bit of something else.

---

Get to know jazz, five songs at a time, with more Take Five lists.

Featured Artist

Vijay Iyer

• The 2015 NPR Music Jazz Critics Poll
• NPR Music's 50 Favorite Albums Of 2015
• NPR Music's 25 Favorite Albums Of 2015 (So Far)

http://www.wadadaleosmith.com/pages/recent.html

My compositions were featured in 'Between Thought and Sound: Graphic Notation in Music' - an exhibition of graphic notations in contemporary music at The Kitchen - NYC (.pdf) 

These 'Panels' below are from compositions that can be heard on my CD 'Luminous Axis' [Tzadik].
 

[click on panel for a larger image]

© 1997-2011 Ishmael Wadada Leo Smith

page 1

Unity and Diversity is a recent composition that can be heard on my solo CD 'Red Sulphur Sky' [Tzadik].

[click on score for a larger image]

'Tawhid' is a recent composition performed by my ensemble 'N'Da Kulture' on our CD 'Golden Hearts Rememberance'.

[click on score for a larger image]

© 1997-2011 Ishmael Wadada Leo Smith

Ten Freedom Summers

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Ten Freedom Summers
Live album and box set by Wadada Leo Smith
Released	May 8, 2012
Recorded	November 4–6, 2011
Venue	Zipper Hall in Los Angeles
Genre	Free jazz, contemporary classical
Length	273:48
Label	Cuneiform
Producer	Southwest Chamber Music, Wadada Leo Smith
Wadada Leo Smith chronology
Dark Lady of the Sonnets (2011) Ten Freedom Summers (2012) Ancestors (2012)

Ten Freedom Summers is a four-disc box set by American trumpeter and composer Wadada Leo Smith, released on May 5, 2012, by Cuneiform Records. Smith wrote its pieces intermittently for 34 years, beginning in 1977, before performing them live in November 2011 at the Colburn School's Zipper Hall in Los Angeles. He was accompanied by the nine-piece Southwest Chamber Music ensemble and his own jazz quartet, featuring drummers Pheeroan akLaff and Susie Ibarra, pianist Anthony Davis, and bassist John Lindberg.

A free jazz and contemporary classical work, Ten Freedom Summers comprises 19 pieces that are mostly fully developed suites. They eschew conventional themes for abstract expressions of the subject matter, which focuses on the Civil Rights Movement and other interrelated topics. Smith cites the segregation of his native Mississippi and playwright August Wilson's The Pittsburgh Cycle as inspirations behind the work. Ten Freedom Summers received widespread acclaim from critics and was named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2013.

Contents

• 1 Background
• 2 Composition
• 3 Critical reception
• 4 Track listing
• 5 Personnel
• 6 Release history
• 7 References
• 8 Further reading
• 9 External links

Background

Ten Freedom Summers was recorded live at the concert hall of the Colburn School (pictured in 2007).

 
Smith started Ten Freedom Summers in 1977, when he wrote the piece "Medgar Evers" as an evocation of the eponymous civil rights activist gunned down in Mississippi in 1963. Smith subsequently worked intermittently on the project.^[1] He spent 34 years writing it,^[2] supported by a series of residencies, grants and commissions, the final one from the Southwest Chamber Music ensemble.^[3] He completed the pieces in a flurry of activity between 2009 and 2011.^[4] Smith was inspired to assemble the pieces into one group by August Wilson's 10-play series The Pittsburgh Cycle.^[3] Smith has said of the idea behind Ten Freedom Summers:

“

I was born in 1941 and grew up in segregated Mississippi and experienced the conditions which made it imperative for an activist movement for equality. I saw that stuff happening. Those are the moments that triggered this. It was in that same environment that I had my first dreams of becoming a composer and performer.[1]

”

Ten Freedom Summers was recorded at Zipper Hall in Los Angeles, where Smith performed live for three nights from November 4 to November 6, 2011.^[5] He played 19 pieces, accompanied by either his Golden Quartet, the nine-piece Southwest Chamber Music ensemble conducted by Jeff von der Schmidt, or both.^[6] Smith's quartet featured drummers Pheeroan akLaff and Susie Ibarra, pianist Anthony Davis, and bassist John Lindberg.^[5]

Composition

	"Emmett Till: Defiant, Fearless" Menu 0:00 In the piece, the strings, harp, and quartet enter gradually and swirl into cacophony in a fuguelike section.[7]
Problems playing this file? See media help.

 
Ten Freedom Summers comprises four discs for a total of four-and-a-half hours of music. Most of its 19 pieces were fully developed suites, with three spanning over 20 minutes. According to Smith, there were no recurring motifs throughout.^[6] Instead of using his own "Ankhrasmation" method of graphic notation, Smith wrote Ten Freedom Summers with a traditionally notated score. His Golden Quartet played music rooted in blues and jazz idioms, and the Southwest Chamber Music ensemble played violin, viola, cello, harp, concert bass, glockenspiel, bass clarinet, flute, tympani, marimba, gongs, and other miscellaneous percussion.^[3] In the opinion of All About Jazz writer Mark Redlefsen, Smith's use of echo-laden, atmospheric sounds in his previous work culminated on Ten Freedom Summers, whose somber mood reflected the pieces' titles.^[8]


The compositions were organized in three principal sections—"Defining Moments in America", "What Is Democracy?", and "Freedom Summers".^[4] Each section's pieces musically described significant figures associated with the African-American Civil Rights Movement during 1954 to 1964 and concepts relevant to the formation of institutions that evolved from human interaction, including government, media, and megacorporations.^[3] Jeff Dayton-Johnson from All About Jazz said although its movements "variously address Malcolm X, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Brown vs. Board of Education, Medgar Evers [and] the Little Rock Nine", the "thematic concerns nevertheless extend ... both backwards (to the 1857 Dred Scott case) and forward (to 9/11), and to a series of cross-cutting concerns (e.g., democracy, the freedom of the press and the black church)."^[6]


According to Josh Langhoff from PopMatters, the box set's pieces "transform their subjects into musical invention and moods; they’re not literal or programmatic." Langhoff finds them similar to contemporary classical pieces in how they "make their points through abstraction."^[7] Daniel Spicer of BBC Music characterized the music as "a mixture of austere contemporary classical composition performed by the LA-based Southwest Chamber Music ensemble, and turbulent free jazz improvised by the Golden Quartet".^[9] In the opinion of jazz critic John Fordham, the presence of either Smith's jazz quartet or the classical ensemble led him to abandon typical themes and continuous pulses in favor of free jazz and contemporary classical idioms.^[10] Bob Rusch believed the performances were not inspired by contemporary Civil Rights Movement music by artists such as Paul Robeson, Pete Seeger, Mahalia Jackson, or Aretha Franklin, because Smith's Golden Quintet exhibited an astral, chamber sound.^[11]

Critical reception

Professional ratings
Review scores
Source	Rating
AllMusic	[4]
The Guardian	[10]
The Independent	[12]
musicOMH	[13]
PopMatters	10/10[7]

Ten Freedom Summers received widespread acclaim from critics. At Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream publications, the album received a weighted average score of 99, based on 8 reviews.^[14] In The Guardian, Fordham called it "a landmark in jazz's rich canon",^[10] while Bill Shoemaker of The Wire deemed it "a monumental evocation of America's civil rights movement".^[15] Glen Hall of Exclaim! wrote that "Smith's music resonates with the suffering and the dreams of a better life that embodied the decade of 1954 to 1964 that is the subject of this powerful compendium of compositions."^[16] AllMusic's Thom Jurek viewed the box set as Smith's best work, writing that it "belongs in jazz's canonical lexicon with Duke Ellington's Black Brown & Beige and Max Roach's Freedom Now Suite."^[4] Phil Johnson from The Independent found the music very gratifying, comparing it to if Miles Davis had recorded Ligeti during the 1950s.^[12] Langhoff wrote in PopMatters that the set was "about sound: the tangible, physically beautiful sounds of Smith's imperative trumpet and of different instruments in combination, testing their own limits." He asserted in conclusion, "In four and a half hours, Wadada Leo Smith writes one of America's defining events in sound, and the story is all of ours."^[7] In Cadence Magazine, Rusch was less enthusiastic and felt the box set could have benefitted from being released as four separate albums, writing that listening to the record in its entirety was "exhausting, but also involving and inspiring".^[11]

Ten Freedom Summers was ranked as one of the best jazz albums of 2012 by AllMusic,^[17] All About Jazz,^[18] JazzTimes,^[19] and the Chicago Reader.^[20] Bret Saunders from The Denver Post named it 2012's best jazz record,^[21] and Down Beat magazine named it their album of the year.^[22] It was also ranked number 31 in The Wire's list of 2012's best albums.^[23] Ten Freedom Summers was one of three finalists for the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Music, along with Aaron Jay Kernis's classical composition "Pieces of Winter Sky" and "Partita for 8 Voices" by Caroline Shaw, who ultimately won the award.^[24]

Track listing

All music composed by Wadada Leo Smith.

Disc one
No.	Title	Length
1.	"Dred Scott: 1857"	11:48
2.	"Malik Al Shabazz and the People of the Shahada"	5:15
3.	"Emmett Till: Defiant, Fearless"	18:02
4.	"Thurgood Marshall and Brown vs. Board of Education: A Dream of Equal Education, 1954"	15:05
5.	"John F. Kennedy's New Frontier and the Space Age, 1960"	22:08

Disc two
No.	Title	Length
1.	"Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott, 381 Days"	12:43
2.	"Black Church"	16:35
3.	"Freedom Summer: Voter Registration, Acts of Compassion and Empowerment, 1964"	12:34
4.	"Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society and the Civil Rights Act of 1964"	24:12

Disc three
No.	Title	Length
1.	"Freedom Riders Ride"	16:40
2.	"Medgar Evers: A Love-Voice of a Thousand Years' Journey for Liberty and Justice"	10:07
3.	"D.C. Wall: A War Memorial for All Times"	12:17
4.	"Buzzsaw: The Myth of a Free Press"	15:03
5.	"Little Rock Nine: A Force for Desegregation in Education, 1957"	13:49

Disc four
No.	Title	Length
1.	"America, Parts 1, 2 & 3"	14:11
2.	"September 11th, 2001: A Memorial"	9:39
3.	"Fannie Lou Hamer and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, 1964"	8:36
4.	"Democracy"	14:30
5.	"Martin Luther King, Jr: Memphis, the Prophecy"	20:34

Personnel

Credits are adapted from the album's liner notes.^[5]

Pheeroan akLaff – drums Alison Bjorkedal – harp Dorothy Cotton – liner notes Dorothy Cowfield – photography Anthony Davis – piano Bill Ellsworth – package design Jeff Evans – editing, mixing engineer Jim Foschia – clarinet Lorenz Gamma – violin Golden Quartet – ensemble, main personnel Golden Quintet – ensemble, main personnel Steve Gunther – photography Lyn Horton – drawing Susie Ibarra – drums Michael Jackson – photography

Peter Jacobson – cello Larry Kaplan – flute Jan Karlin – viola Warren K. Leffler – photography John Lindberg – bass Gene Paul – mastering engineer Tom Peters – bass Jamie Polaski – mastering assistant Jeff von der Schmidt – conductor Wadada Leo Smith – composer, executive producer, primary artist, producer, trumpet Matthew Snyder – engineer Southwest Chamber Music – ensemble, executive producer, producer Matthew Sumera – liner notes Lynn Vartan – percussion Shalini Vijayan – violin

Release history

Region	Date	Label	Format
Canada[25]	May 8, 2012	Cuneiform Records	CD
Japan[26]	May 20, 2012
United Kingdom[27][28]	May 21, 2012
	May 22, 2012		digital download
United States[29]			CD, digital download

References:

"Wadada Leo Smith's Golden Quartet". Cuneiform Records. Retrieved January 15, 2013.

Burk, Greg (October 23, 2011). "Wadada Leo Smith's opus". Los Angeles Times. Retrieved January 15, 2013.

Horton, Lyn (November 5, 2011). "Wadada Leo Smith: Ten Freedom Summers". JazzTimes (Quincy). Retrieved January 20, 2013.

Jurek, Thom. "Ten Freedom Summers - Wadada Leo Smith". Allmusic. Rovi Corporation. Retrieved January 15, 2013.

Cotton, Dorothy; Sumera, Matthew (2012). Ten Freedom Summers (CD liner). Wadada Leo Smith. Silver Spring: Cuneiform Records. 350/351/352/353.

Dayton-Johnson, Jeff (June 18, 2012). "Wadada Leo Smith: Ten Freedom Summers". All About Jazz. Vision X Software. pp. 1–3. Archived from the original on November 11, 2012. Retrieved November 11, 2012.

Langhoff, Josh (August 31, 2012). "Wadada Leo Smith: Ten Freedom Summers". PopMatters. Archived from the original on September 10, 2015. Retrieved September 10, 2015.

Redlefsen, Mark (June 25, 2012). "Wadada Leo Smith: Ten Freedom Summers". All About Jazz. Vision X Software. Retrieved January 19, 2013.

"Review of Wadada Leo Smith - Ten Freedom Summers". BBC Music. 2012. Retrieved September 10, 2015.

Fordham, John (August 30, 2012). "Ishmael Wadada Leo Smith: Ten Freedom Summers – review". The Guardian (London). section G2, p. 24. Retrieved January 15, 2013.

Rusch, Bob (2013). "Papatamus". Cadence Magazine (Portland) 39 (1): 55–56. ISSN 0162-6973.

Johnson, Phil (June 3, 2012). "Album: Wadada Leo Smith, Ten Freedom Summers (Cuneiform)". The Independent (London). Retrieved January 15, 2013.

Paton, Daniel. "Wadada Leo Smith - Ten Freedom Summers". musicOMH. Retrieved January 15, 2013.

"Ten Freedom Summers Reviews, Ratings, Credits, and More". Metacritic. CBS Interactive. Retrieved November 11, 2012.

Shoemaker, Bill (May 2012). "Review: Ten Freedom Summers". The Wire (London).

Hall, Glen (May 29, 2012). "Wadada Leo Smith - Ten Freedom Summers". Exclaim! (Toronto). Retrieved January 16, 2013.

Staff (December 24, 2012). "AllMusic’s Favorite Jazz Albums of 2012". Allmusic. Rovi Corporation. Retrieved March 17, 2013.

Sharpe, John (December 26, 2012). "John Sharpe’s Best Releases of 2012". All About Jazz. Vision X Software. Retrieved March 17, 2013.

"JazzTimes' Top 50 CDs: Individual Ballots". JazzTimes (Quincy). January 2, 2013. Retrieved March 17, 2013.

Margasak, Peter (December 28, 2012). "My favorite jazz albums of 2012". Chicago Reader. Retrieved March 17, 2013.

Saunders, Bret (December 23, 2012). "Top ten jazz albums of 2012". The Denver Post. Retrieved March 17, 2013.

"Ten Freedom Summers". Acclaimed Music. Retrieved September 10, 2015.

"2012 Rewind". The Wire (London) (347). January 2013.

Talbott, Chris (April 15, 2013). "Caroline Shaw Wins 2013 Pulitzer Music Prize". Billboard. Retrieved September 10, 2015.

"Ten Freedom Summers : 4CD". HMV Canada. Archived from the original on November 13, 2012. Retrieved November 13, 2012.

"Ten Freedom Summers" (in Japanese). HMV Japan. Archived from the original on November 13, 2012. Retrieved November 13, 2012.

"Wadada Leo Smith: Ten Freedom Summers: 4cd (2012)". HMV UK. Archived from the original on November 11, 2012. Retrieved November 11, 2012.

"Ten Freedom Summers (2012)". 7digital. Archived from the original on November 11, 2012. Retrieved November 11, 2012.

29. "Wadada Leo Smith - Ten Freedom Summers CD Album". CD Universe. Muze. Archived from the original on November 11, 2012. Retrieved November 11, 2012.

Further reading

• Matzner, Franz A. (March 14, 2011). "Wadada Leo Smith: The Teacher". All About Jazz.
• Ratliff, Ben (May 3, 2013). "Stirring and Sad, a Jazz Montage of a Struggle". The New York Times. p. C1.

External links

• Official website
• Stuart Broomer's pointofdeparture column on the album and related topics
• Ten Freedom Summers at Cuneiform Records
• Ten Freedom Summers at Discogs

 

THE MUSIC OF WADADA LEO SMITH: AN EXTENSIVE VIDEO OVERVIEW, A CROSS SECTION OF RECORDINGS, MUSICAL ANALYSIS AND COMMENTARY, PLUS VARIOUS INTERVIEWS WITH WADADA LEO SMITH:

Wadada Leo Smith's Golden Quartet

"Rosa Parks" (Excerpt):

 

"Rosa Parks" by Wadada Leo Smith's Golden Quartet from the album 'Tabligh' (Cuneiform Records).

Purchase now at:
Amazon - http://www.amazon.com/Tabligh-Wadada-...
iTunes - https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/tab...
Bandcamp - http://cuneiformrecords.bandcamp.com/...
Wayside - http://www.waysidemusic.com/Music-Pro...

Recorded live, the sound on Tabligh veers from a sound akin to early electric jazz ala "In A Silent Way" and especially 'the lost quintet' of Miles in late 1969/early 1970, to both more sparse and modern jazz fare, all of it informed by the distinctive personalities of these four players and their leader's musical concepts.

Wadada Leo Smith is a well-respected trumpeter and composer working in avant-garde jazz and improvisation. He was an early member of Chicago’s legendary AACM, joining in 1967 and co-founded the Creative Construction Company, a trio with Leroy Jenkins and Anthony Braxton in the late 60s. In 1971 Smith formed his own label, Kabell, for whom he recorded a number of albums considered classics of their kind. He is currently a professor of Music at the California Institute of the Arts, and is the director of the MFA program in African American Improvisation. Smith has studied a variety of music cultures (African, Japanese, Indonesian, European and American) and has developed a music theory, and a notation system to fully express this music which he calls "Ankhrasmation". He has been a major force in contemporary jazz for over 40 years and performs frequently throughout the world. We first worked with Wadada when we released the two "Yo Miles" albums, of which he was co-leader, and we both enjoyed working together so much that we decided to work together again on one of his own works.

Album Personnel:

Wadada Leo Smith – trumpet
Vijay Iyer – piano, Fender Rhodes & synthesizer
John Lindberg – bass
Shannon Jackson – drums

Available for purchase on
iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/tab...
Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Tabligh-Wadada-...
Bandcamp: http://cuneiformrecords.bandcamp.com/...
Wayside Music: http://www.waysidemusic.com/Music-Pro...

 

Vijay Iyer & Wadada Leo Smith – "Passages":

 

Vijay Iyer & Wadada Leo Smith
'a cosmic rhythm with each stroke'
 
Vijay Iyer: Piano, Fender Rhodes, Electronics
Wadada Leo Smith: Trumpet

"a cosmic rhythm with each stroke" features pianist Viay Iyer and the musician he has described as his “hero, friend and teacher”, trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith. Vijay has previously played extensively with Wadada in Smith’s Golden Quartet, but the present album is the first documentation of their duo work, produced by Manfred Eicher at New York’s Avatar Studios in October 2015. The centre-piece of the album is the spellbinding title suite, dedicated to Nasreen Mohamedi (1937-1990), the innovative Indian artist whose improvisatory imagery evokes abstracted rhythms. Trumpet and piano interact here with creative sensitivity to tone, texture and space. Vijay Iyer and Wadada Leo Smith will be premiering a cosmic rhythm with each stroke at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art in March 2016 in the context of a major exhibition dedicated to Nasreen Mohamedi’s art and writings. The “suite for Nasreen” is framed on the album by Iyer’s composition “Passage” and Smith’s concluding piece “Marian Anderson”, inspired by the great US contralto.

ECM 2486

https://www.ecmrecords.com
 
Golden Quartet: 

 


Wadada Leo Smith Golden Quartet - Eclipse (2005, La Huit)

Wadada Leo Smith : trumpet
Vijay Iyer : piano
John Lindberg : bass
Ronald Shannon Jackson : drums

Recorded live at Festival Banlieues Bleues in 2004.

Wadada Leo Smith's Golden Quartet live at Jazzadlia in San Sebastián, Spain:

 

Lake Michigan

From the Album 'The Great Lakes Suites':
 

 

Leo Smith-'Divine love':

 

From Divine love lp:
Recorded September 1978 Tonstudio Bauer,Ludwigsburg

Leo Smith-
trumpet,flugelhorn,steel o-phone,gongs,percussion

Dwight Andrews-alto flute,bass clarinet,tenor saxophone, triangles, mbira.

Bobby Naughton-vibraharp,marimba,bells

Wadada Leo Smith’s Golden Quartet:

 

Trumpeter, composer, and 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Music finalist, Wadada Leo Smith is a boldly original figure in American jazz and one of the great trumpet players of our time. Smith’s classic Golden Quartet line-up features legendary improvisers Anthony Davis, John Lindberg, and Pheeroan akLaff, and AllMusic calls it “jazz that is so fresh and well executed as to define and remind what’s great about listening to the music.”

Leo Smith Creative Orchestra - 'Budding of a Rose':

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wC7YQjoRkJc

 

Personnel:

Roscoe Mitchell, altosax
Anthony Braxton, reeds
Douglas Ewart, reeds
Wallace McMillian, reeds
Dwight Andrews, reeds
Marty Ehrlich, reeds
Leo Smith, trumpet
Kenny Wheeler, trumpet
Hugh Ragin, trumpet
Mike Mossmann, trumpet
Rob Howard, trumpet
George Lewis, trombone
Ray Anderson, trombone
Alfred Patterson, trombone
Pinguin Moschner, tuba
Wes Brown, bass
Pheeroan ak Laff, drums, percussion
Marilyn Crispell, piano
Bobby Naughton, vibes
 
from the album "Budding Of A Rose"
Recorded at Palm Studio, Paris, France - June 1979.
Produced by Jef Gilson.
Created with http://tovid.io

 

Wadada Leo Smith - "Martin Luther King, Jr."

 

"Martin Luther King, Jr." by Wadada Leo Smith from the album 'Ten Freedom Summers' (Cuneiform Records).

Trumpeter/composer Wadada Leo Smith’s Ten Freedom Summers is the work of a lifetime by one of jazz’s true visionaries, a kaleidoscopic, spiritually charged opus inspired by the struggle for African-American freedom and equality before the law. Triumphant and mournful, visceral and philosophical, searching, scathing and relentlessly humane, Smith’s music embraces the turbulent era’s milestones while celebrating the civil rights movement’s heroes and martyrs. This four-disc set documents a stunning, career-capping accomplishment by a jazz giant in the midst of an astonishing creative surge.

An orchestral collaboration with the acclaimed eight-piece ensemble Southwest Chamber Music (harp, clarinet, 2 violins, cello, flute, viola, bass, percussion) conducted by Grammy Award-winner Jeff von der Schmidt, Ten Freedom Summers is built upon Smith’s celebrated Golden Quartet featuring pianist Anthony Davis, bassist John Lindberg, drummer Susie Ibarra and/or drummer Pheeroan akLaaf (who often expands the ensemble to a quintet). As a child of the Deep South who was raised in the red-hot crucible of the civil rights movement, Smith traces the project’s origins back to 1977, when he wrote “Medgar Evers,” an expansive evocation of the NAACP activist gunned down in Mississippi 14 years earlier.

Working in fits and starts, Smith completed the 19-piece project 34 years later in October of 2011 with a portentous, elegiac piece for Southwest Chamber Music. In designing the huge, multi-movement work, he focused on the transformative decade framed by the landmark 1954 Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education, and the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

"I was born in 1941 and grew up in segregated Mississippi and experienced the conditions which made it imperative for an activist movement for equality,” says Smith says, who marked his 70th birthday with a presentation of this, perhaps his most ambitious undertaking. “I saw that stuff happening. Those are the moments that triggered this. It was in that same environment that I had my first dreams of becoming a composer and performer.”

After decades of being revered by his peers and colleagues, Smith is attaining his rightful place at the forefront of American music. Ten Freedom Summers is an important work that combines unique, fully scored rigorous passages and great improvisational skills into one huge and cohesive work. It is a thrilling, emotionally charged and satisfying work from a master.

Album Personnel:
Wadada Leo Smith - composer, trumpet
Anthony Davis - piano
John Lindberg - bass
Pheeroan akLaff - drums
Susie Ibarra - drums

For more information:
http://www.cuneiformrecords.com/
http://twitter.com/cuneiformrecord
http://www.facebook.com/cuneiformrecords
https://www.instagram.com/cuneiformre...

 

 

 

 

 

http://www.wadadaleosmith.com/pages/ten_freedom.html

		Wadada Leo Smith's Ten Freedom Summers Defining Moments in the History of the United States of  America Ten Freedom Summers is a large work inspired by the  activity of the civil rights movement from The Niagara falls  congress in 1905 and 1948, when President Harry S. Truman  signed the Executive Order 9981 and up to  Dr. Martin Luther  King's Memphis speech in 1968.
Wadada Leo Smith has composed a new work for the "Ten Freedom Summers" collection! This new work is entitled "The March on Washington D.C.- August 28, 1963" and will be  for quintet (trumpet, piano, bass, 2 drummers), string quartet, and harp. The ensembles  performing the work include the Golden Quartet, the Pacific Coral Reef Ensemble, the  Flux String Quartet and video artist Jesse Gilbert. This new work will be approximately  15 minutes long. Wadada premiered this new work at Roulette in Brooklyn, NY in 2013  to commemorate the 50th anniversary of this historic event.
Videos | Photos NEW! - videos of Wadada and the Golden Quartet performing Ten Freedom Summers live in San Sebastian, Spain, July, 2014 NEW! - video of Wadada and the Golden Quartet performing "September 11th, 2001: A Memorial" live at Café OTO, London Nov., 2013 NEW! - Ten Freedom Summers CD Released on Cuneiform Records Videos of Wadada speaking about Ten Freedom Summers Interview with Wadada about Ten Freedom Summers by Greg Burk/LA Times
Over the years I thought that I would compose a  tribute to the civil rights movement, centered in the  activities of two decades 1948-1968, much in the  same way that August Wilson's plays comment on  ten decades of the African-American experience in  America, but through musical composition/ improvisation.
Over the years I thought that I would compose a  tribute to the civil rights movement, centered in  the activities of two decades 1948-1968, much  in the same way that August Wilson's plays   comment on ten decades of the African-American  experience in America, but through musical composition/improvisation.   This musical work is the result of my research and reflection concerning the philosophical,  social and political history of the United States of America. Ten Freedom Summers is  programmed as three evenings of music, and is composed for Golden Quartet and Southwest  Chamber Music, an ensemble of nine performers. The world premiere will take place  October 28-30, 2011, at REDCAT at Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, California. Medgar Evers: A Love Voice of a Thousand Years Journey, Liberty and Justice was completed  in 1977, and is the earliest work in the collections.  John F. Kennedy's New Frontier and the Space Age completes Ten Freedom Summers cycle. Five compositions were composed during my 2009/2010 Fellowship with the John Simon  Guggenheim Foundation. Southwest Chamber Music commissioned four compositions, funded by the James Irvine  Foundation and Clarence E. Heller Charitable Foundation. Ten Freedom Summers was commissioned by Chamber Music America with support  from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation; and Southwest Chamber Music. The work has three major collections; First Collection: Defining Moments in America Second Collection: What is Democracy ? Third Collection: Ten Freedom Summers

	First Collection: Defining Moments in America   1) America parts 1 and 2 2) Fannie Lou Hamer and the Mississippi Freedom Democracy Party, 1964 (1-2 composed during Djerassi Foundation residency) 3) Emmett Till: Defiant, Fearless (commissioned by Southwest Chamber Music with support from NEA and MAP Fund) 4) Rosa Parks, and the Montgomery Bus Boycott, 381 Days 5) The Freedom Riders Ride 6) The Washington D.C. Memorial Wall Second Collection: What is Democracy ? 7) Dred Scott: 1857: The Issuers of Immigration, Human Rights and who can be an American 8) Democracy 9) Buzzsaw: The Myth of the Free Press and Corporate Power
	10) Al Hajj Malik Al Shabazz and the People of the  Shahadah 11) September Eleventh, 2001: A Memorial (7-11 composed during John Simon Guggenheim  Fellowship) 12) Medgar Evers: A Love-Voice of a Thousand Years Journey: Liberty and Justice Third Collection: Ten Freedom Summers 13) Thurgood Marshall and Brown v. Board of  Education: A Dream of Equal Education, 1954 14) Little Rock Nine: A Force for Desegregation in  Education, 1957 15) Freedom Summer: Voter Registration, an Act of  Compassion and Empowerment, 1964 (13-15 commissioned by Chamber Music America with  support from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation) 16) John F Kennedy’s New Frontier and the Space Age,  1960 (commissioned by Southwest Chamber Music with support from NEA and MAP Fund) 17) Lyndon B Johnson's Great Society and   The Civil Rights Act of 1964 18) Dr Martin Luther King, Jr.: Memphis, the Prophecy 19) Courage to Dissent, Forces for Change (17-19 commissioned by Southwest Chamber Music with  support from the James Irvine Foundation and Clarence  E. Heller Charitable Foundation)
	Videos Wadada Leo Smith performing in San Sebastián, Spain at the Heineken Jazzaldia Festival, July 25th, 2014 watch on vimeo Wadada Leo Smith's Golden Quartet live at Jazzadlia in  San Sebastián, Spain watch on vimeo Video of Wadada and the Golden Quartet performing "September 11th, 2001: A Memorial" live at Café OTO,  London Nov., 2013 watch on youtube Composer Wadada Leo Smith and conductor Jeff von  der Schmidt discuss the composition and performance  of Ten Freedom Summers watch on youtube 2011-2012 Ten Freedom Summers: October 28, 29,  30 - Southwest Chamber Music watch on youtube 2011-2012 Ten Freedom Summers: October 28, 29,  30 - Southwest Chamber Music watch on youtube   http://www.wadadaleosmith.com/pages/bio.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wadada_Leo_Smith  Wadada Leo Smith From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Wadada Leo Smith Photo by Tom Beetz Background information Born December 18, 1941 (age 74) Leland, Mississippi, United States Genres Avant-garde jazz, free improvisation Occupation(s) Trumpeter, composer Instruments Trumpet, flugelhorn, koto, kalimba, atenteben Associated acts Creative Construction Company, New Dalta Ahkri Website Official website Ishmael Wadada Leo Smith (born December 18, 1941) is an American trumpeter and composer, working primarily in the fields of avant-garde jazz and free improvisation.[1] He was one of three finalists for the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Music for Ten Freedom Summers, released on May 22, 2012.[2] Contents 1 Biography 2 Discography 2.1 As leader 2.2 As sideman 3 References 4 External links Biography Smith was born in Leland, Mississippi. He started out playing drums, mellophone, and French horn before he settled on the trumpet. He played in various R&B groups and by 1967 became a member of the AACM and co-founded the Creative Construction Company, a trio with Leroy Jenkins and Anthony Braxton. In 1971, Smith formed his own label, Kabell. He also formed another band, the New Dalta Ahkri, with members including Henry Threadgill, Anthony Davis and Oliver Lake. In the 1970s, Smith studied ethnomusicology at Wesleyan University. He played again with Anthony Braxton, as well as recording with Derek Bailey's Company. In the mid-1980s, Smith became Rastafarian and began using the name Wadada. In 1993, he began teaching at Cal Arts, a position he held until 2014. In addition to trumpet and flugelhorn, Smith plays several world music instruments, including the koto, kalimba, and atenteben (Ghanaian bamboo flute). He has also taught courses in instrument making. His compositions often use a graphic notation system he calls "Ankhrasmation", which he developed in 1970. In 1998, Smith and guitarist Henry Kaiser released Yo, Miles!, a tribute to Miles Davis's then-lesser-known 1970s electric period. On this album, Smith, Kaiser and a large cast of musicians recorded cover versions and original compositions inspired by Miles's electric music. The follow-ups Sky Garden (released by Cuneiform in 2004) and Upriver (released in 2005) were recorded with a different cast of musicians. Both line-ups featured Michael Manring on bass. Smith's Golden Quartet (with which he has released several albums) originally featured Jack DeJohnette on drums, Anthony Davis on keyboards, and Malachi Favors on bass. After several iterations, the Golden Quartet now features Pheeroan akLaff on drums, John Lindberg on bass, and Davis on piano. During the 2000s, Smith recorded albums for John Zorn's label Tzadik, as well as Pi Recordings. In 2008, he and his Golden Quartet released a DVD entitled Freedom Now. Discography As leader 1972: Creative Music - 1 (Kabell) 1975: Reflectativity (Kabell) 1977: Song of Humanity (Kabell) 1978: Mass on the World (Moers) 1979: Divine Love (ECM) 1979: Budding of a Rose (Moers) 1979: Spirit Catcher (Nessa) 1980: Touch the Earth (FMP) 1981: Akhreanvention (Kabell) 1982: Go in Numbers (Black Saint) 1982: If You Want the Kernels, You Have to Break the Shells (FMP) 1982: Human Rights (Kabell) 1983: Procession of the Great Ancestry (Nessa, issued 1989) 1983: Rastafari (Sackville) 1986: The Blue Mountain's Sun Drummer with Ed Blackwell (Kabell, issued 2010) 1993: Kulture Jazz (ECM) 1996: Tao-Njia (Tzadik) 1997: Golden Hearts Remembrance (Chap Chap) 1997: Prataksis (Ninewinds) 1998: Condor, Autumn Wind (Wobbly Rail) 1999: Light Upon Light (Tzadik) 2000: Reflectativity (Tzadik) 2000: Golden Quartet (Tzadik) 2001: Red Sulphur Sky (Tzadik) 2002: The Year of the Elephant (Pi Recordings) 2002: Luminous Axis (Tzadik) 2003: Organic Resonance (Pi Recordings) 2004: Lake Biwa (Tzadik) 2004: Saturn, Conjunct the Grand Canyon in a Sweet Embrace (Pi Recordings) 2005: Snakish (Leo) 2006: Compassion (Meta/Kabell) 2007: Wisdom in Time (Intakt) 2008: Tabligh (Cuneiform) 2009: America (Tzadik) 2009: Spiritual Dimensions (Cuneiform) 2009: Abbey Road Quartet (Treader) 2011: Heart's Reflections (Cuneiform) 2011: Dark Lady of the Sonnets (TUM Records) 2012: Ten Freedom Summers (Cuneiform) 2012: Ancestors (TUM Records) 2013: Occupy The World (TUM Records) 2014: Sonic Rivers (Tzadik) - with George Lewis and John Zorn 2014: Red Hill (Rare Noise) - with Jamie Saft, Joe Morris and Balazs Pandi 2014: The Great Lakes Suites (TUM Records) 2014: June 6th 2013 (Novara Jazz) - with Eco D'Alberi 2015: Celestial Weather (TUM Records) - with John Lindberg As sideman With Muhal Richard Abrams Young at Heart/Wise in Time (Delmark, 1974) With Marion Brown Geechee Recollections (Impulse!, 1973) With Anthony Braxton 3 Compositions of New Jazz (Delmark, 1968) Anthony Braxton (BYG Actuel, 1969) This Time... (BYG Actuel, 1970) Trio and Duet (Sackville, 1974) Creative Orchestra Music 1976 (Arista, 1976) Creative Orchestra (Köln) 1978 (hatART, 1978 [1995]) With Creative Construction Company Creative Construction Company (Muse, 1970 [1975]) Creative Construction Company Vol. II (Muse, 1970 [1976]) With Henry Kaiser Yo, Miles! (Shanachie, 1998) Sky Garden (Cuneiform, 2004) Upriver (Cuneiform, 2004) With Frank Lowe The Flam (Black Saint, 1975) With Matthew Shipp New Orbit (Thirsty Ear, 2001) With Spring Heel Jack The Sweetness of the Water (Thirsty Ear, 2004) With John Zorn 50th Birthday Celebration Volume 8 (Tzadik, 2003) The Unknown Masada (Tzadik, 2003) References "Wadada Leo Smith | Biography". AllMusic. 1941-12-18. Retrieved 2014-03-23. "The Pulitzer Prizes | Citation". Pulitzer.org. Retrieved 2014-03-23. External links Official website A Fireside Chat With Wadada Leo Smith by Fred Jung Posted: 2003-11-29 Henry Kaiser & Wadada Leo Smith - Sky Garden (Review) - Published in The Music Box, July 2004, Vol. 11, No. 7 FMP releases Art of the States: Wadada Leo Smith Bardsdale (1997–1998) Tawaf from 2003's "Organic Resonance" on Pi Recordings Solo performance, July 2000 at SASSAS sound. concert archives "Wadada Leo Smith: The OFN Interview" by Matthew Sumera: April and June 2005