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Wadada Leo Smith, Bill Laswell, and Milford Graves: Sacred Ceremonies & Trumpet
by Mike Jurkovic
The 1960's and '70s held such promise, but many artists settle for what is handed down. Two new box sets featuring Wadada Leo Smith with Bill Laswell and Milford Graves show three visionaries willing to build on those promises without compromise. Wadada Leo Smith with MIlford Graves and Bill Laswell Sacred Ceremonies TUM Records 2021 Recorded in three days during three separate sessions at Laswell's West Orange, New Jersey studio in the foreboding ...
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by Karl Ackermann
As he approached his eightieth birthday, Wadada Leo Smith could have been content to sit out the year of nothingness that Covid-19 brought in 2020 and beyond. With his 2013 Pulitzer Prize nomination, a 2016 Doris Duke Award, and nearly one-hundred recording credits, the trumpeter & multi-instrumentalist has landed at the top of countless polls throughout his distinguished career. But, stepping away from the music, if only for a brief respite, is not part of the improviser's plan so, in ...
Continue ReadingWadada Leo Smith / Douglas Ewart / Mike Reed: Sun Beans Of Shimmering Light
by John Sharpe
Three significant forces spanning two generations of the forward-thinking Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians meet in a poised recital on Sun Beans Of Shimmering Light. Although recorded in 2015 at drummer Mike Reed's Constellation arts space in Chicago, the concert's genesis lies some five years earlier and 700 miles to the east. When Reed's band People, Places & Things played the 2010 Vision Festival in NYC on the same evening as Wadada Leo Smith, the ...
Continue ReadingWadada Leo Smith / Douglas R. Ewart / Mike Reed & Benoit Delbecq
by Maurice Hogue
The lineup for this edition of OMJ is like a menu in an ice cream shop: so many flavours to choose from. The AACM is alive and well in the excellent new release for Astral Spirits by Wadada Leo Smith, Douglas R. Ewart & Mike Reed, power guitar from Slovenia's Samo Salamon with a French quartet, prepared piano from Benoit Delbecq, Jorma Tapio and Rolling Thunder from Finland, and the Zoom-session created Some Kind Of Tomorrow by Jane Ira Bloom ...
Continue ReadingDeerhoof and Wadada Leo Smith: To Be Surrounded By Beautiful, Curious, Breathing, Laughing Flesh Is Enough
by Troy Dostert
When it comes to combining the anarchic spirit of punk rock with whip-smart musicianship and a penchant for unbelievably catchy grooves, few bands come close to Deerhoof. Since the 1990s, the group has been cherished by indie rock cognoscenti, and they've also earned the respect of a large swath of the non-rock community as well, working with an astonishing range of artists, from Questlove to Matana Roberts to Anthony Braxton. And on their latest release, it's Wadada Leo Smith who ...
Continue ReadingLeo Smith and New Dalta Ahkri
by Daniel Barbiero
Coming to New England: Emerson, Ives and Brown When trumpeter/composer Leo Smith returned to the United States after having spent 1969-1970 in Europe, he settled not in New York, as most jazz musicians might be expected to do, or even in Chicago, where he'd spent a fruitful several years in the 1960s. Instead, he chose to settle in New Haven, Connecticut.New Haven at the time was, as it largely still is, an economically straitened, post-industrial college town—on the ...
Continue ReadingWadada Leo Smith: Rosa Parks: Pure Love. An Oratorio of Seven Songs
by Giuseppe Segala
Un lavoro ambizioso, profondo e impegnativo, questo Rosa Parks: Pure Love. An Oratorio of Seven Songs di Wadada Leo Smith, dove il musicista affronta nuovamente con passione un capitolo della vicenda nero-americana per la dignità e i Diritti Civili negli Stati Uniti. Ricordiamo lo splendido lavoro, riunito in un cofanetto di quattro CD pubblicato nel 2012 dalla Cuneiform Records con il titolo Ten Freedom Summers, dove Wadada leggeva da un'angolazione artistica differente la stessa tematica. Già in ...
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