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Artist Profiles
Wadada Leo Smith: A Vital Life Force
Lyn Horton
Lyn is first and foremost a visual artist. Her second love is music and the musicians who make it.Since Ornette Coleman turned jazz around with his own harmolodic system of music organization, Smith says, jazz cannot be recreated. Jazz lies at the core of the music that followed it, but cannot be redone because the age has changed. Smith is a part of that age of change. He is a creative musician. He has realized yet another means to organize music that is about freedom, the same kind of freedom that accompanies the unrestricted improvisations that are the blues, which are so dear to and in his heart.
He rediscovers himself every day, both as a musician and as a human being, a part of nature, a part of the world. He practices a religious tradition where teaching and learning go hand in hand and are a part of one another. He is a conveyor of ideas with which he is exceedingly generous.
In the same way that silence and sound complete each other, so does the trumpet and writing music complete Wadada Leo Smith.
Selected Discography
Wadada Leo Smith, Spiritual Dimensions (Cuneiform Records, 2009)
Wadada Leo Smith, Abbey Road Quartet (Treader, 2009)
Wadada Leo Smith/Jack DeJohnette, America (Tzadik, 2009)
Wadada Leo Smith, Procession of the Great Ancestry (Nessa, 1989, 2009)
Wadada Leo Smith, Spirit Catcher (Nessa, 1979, 2009)
Wadada Leo Smith's Golden Quartet, Tabligh (Cuneiform Records, 2008)
Henry Kaiser/Wadada Leo Smith/Yo Miles!, Upriver (Cuneiform, 2005)
Wadada Leo Smith, Lake Biwa (Tzadik, 2004)
Wadada Leo Smith, Luminous Axis: The Caravans of Summer and Winter (Tzadik, 2002)
Wadada Leo Smith, Red Sulphur Sky (Tzadik, 2001)
Wadada Leo Smith, Human Rights (Kabell Records, 1986)
Wadada Leo Smith's Golden Quartet, Eclipse (DVD, La Huit, 2005)
Photo Credits
Page 1: Courtesy of Wadada Leo Smith
Pages 2, 4: Frank Rubolino
Page 3, Rhythm Unit and Pacifica Panel: Courtesy of Wadada Leo Smith
Page 5: Cees van de Ven
