Jazz Articles about Wadada Leo Smith

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Wadada Leo Smith: Tabligh

by AAJ Italy Staff
October 20, 2008

Parlare dei numerosi punti di contatto fra la musica di questo ottimo album del trombettista Wadada Leo Smith e i capolavori elettrici di Miles Davis dei primi anni settanta potrebbe sembrare riduttivo per l’arte sopraffina di Smith, ma non è affatto così. Questo gruppo denominato 'Golden Quartet' ha infatti la competenza tecnica e la personalità per percorrere una strada propria che sa fare uso discreto delle suggestioni per poi avanzare con coerenza e passione lungo scenari che sono assolutamente originali ...

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Wadada Leo Smith's Golden Quartet: Tabligh

by Nic Jones
August 25, 2008

Trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith has always carved out his own territory in the music and Tabligh is one of the best realizations of his work on record. Working with this trumpet/keyboards/bass/drums quartet format for some time now, this set captures in true splendor how constructively that time has been spent.

The band is alert to every inflection of Smith's music and the leader responds largely with lines that seem less fractious than the work he's perhaps noted for. Thus his ...

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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 ...

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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 ...

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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 ...

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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 ...

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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 ...