Jazz Articles about Wadada Leo Smith

Wadada Leo Smith's Golden Quartet: Tabligh

by Troy Collins
August 21, 2008

From his seminal days in the late sixties as co-founder of the Creative Construction Company with fellow AACM members Leroy Jenkins and Anthony Braxton to his ethno-musical investigations with his Nda-Kulture ensemble, trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith has explored a dizzying array of musical genres and styles. His most recent projects have paid tribute to the early fusion experiments of Miles Davis, the most notable is Yo Miles!, a heavily electrified collective co-led by guitarist Henry Kaiser.

Smith's current ...

Wadada Leo Smith's Golden Quartet: Tabligh

by Jerry D'Souza
August 18, 2008

Trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith's Golden Quartet is an evolving ensemble. The original line-up had Anthony Davis (piano), Jack DeJohnette (drums) and Malachi Favors Magoustos (bass). Then came Woody Aplanalp (guitar), Famoudou Don Moye (drums) and John Lindberg (drums). Smith had changed the line-up to give shape to his music. The current edition of the quartet retains Lindberg, but has Vijay Iyer (piano, Fender Rhodes, synthesizer) and Shannon Jackson (drums). As with the earlier tandems, Tabligh's every member is a loquacious ...

Wadada Leo Smith's Golden Quartet: Tabligh

by Kurt Gottschalk
July 19, 2008

Wadada Leo Smith's first Golden Quartet record came as a happy surprise during a burst of activity. The five albums he released on Tzadik from 1999 to 2002 focused largely on his beautifully serene, long-form compositions. But 2000's Golden Quartet seemed to mark not just a new standing band for the trumpeter but an exciting new group within the first generation of Chicago's Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. With fellow AACM'ers Anthony Davis (piano) and Malachi Favors Magoustous ...

Wadada Leo Smith's Golden Quartet: Tabligh

by Dan McClenaghan
July 5, 2008

For Tabligh, trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith has reassembled a Golden Quartet to blow, very Miles Davis-like, on a follow-up recording to Year of the Elephant (Pi Recordings, 2002). But the lineup, excepting the leader, has changed.The sound is, in part, an exploration of Miles' electric period, from 1969-75, albeit in a sparer mode--a rhythm section and the trumpet rather than the guitar-driven, multi-layered assaults of some of Davis's more adventurous days. The music is dark, turbulent, murky, intense--often ...

Wadada Leo Smith / Gunter Baby Sommer: Wisdom In Time

by Nic Jones
September 16, 2007

This program of duo performances by trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith and drummer Gunter Baby Sommer is both the renewal on record of a long-standing musical relationship and at the same time a kind of homage to their fallen comrade, the bassist Peter Kowald, whose death robbed the improvised music scene of one of its stalwarts. Amongst other things, the three men had recorded as a trio (Touch the Earth, FMP Records, 1979) and their shared history lends this music a ...

Wadada Leo Smith: Wisdom in Time & Brooklyn Duos

by Kurt Gottschalk
September 8, 2007

Wadada Leo Smith/Gunter Baby Sommer Wisdom in Time Intakt 2007 John Coxon/Wadada Leo Smith Brooklyn Duos Treader 2007

The duo of Wadada Leo Smith and Günter Baby Sommer is the remains of a trio pulled together by the late bassist Peter Kowald some 30 years ago. The group recorded two excellent ...

John Coxon / Wadada Leo Smith: Brooklyn Duos

by Eyal Hareuveni
August 26, 2007

John Coxon of the British drum n' bass duo Spring Heel Jack first collaborated with American trumpeter and composer Wadada Leo Smith on the duo's last and most challenging and fully realized effort, The Sweetness of The Water (Thirsty Ear, 2004). This release was recorded a year later in Brooklyn by John Zorn collaborator Jamie Saft.

But whereas The Sweetness of the Water was a beautiful showcase of an emphatic and conversational meeting between Smith and another master ...