Jazz Articles about Wadada Leo Smith

About Wadada Leo Smith

Radio & Podcasts

Wadada Leo Smith, The Red Microphone & Clean Feed Releases

by Maurice Hogue
June 9, 2021

Trumpet master and composer Wadada Leo Smith continues to produce astonishing original music. Zeroing in on the age of 80 seems to have no impact. There are two new releases from the Finnish Tum label to show Smith's creativity: Sacred Ceremonies with Bill Laswell and Milford Graves and the other a solo set. Some of Clean Feed Records' latest batch of new releases are sampled--the interesting Red Microphone from New York drops only its second album, And I Become Of ...

Album Review

Wadada Leo Smith: Trumpet

Read "Trumpet" reviewed by Karl Ackermann

by Karl Ackermann
May 25, 2021

In a half-century of recording, he has never stopped exploring the parameters of the form and instrument. Listening to composer/trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith is demanding but rewarding. His inspirations are classical in the small 'c' sense: the AACM, Persian music, August Wilson, Stravinsky, spirituals, and so on. Before the masses woke, Smith's music had incorporated political, cultural, spiritual, and environmental awareness. The elder statesman of new music continues his prolific output with TUM Records box sets for the first half ...

Multiple Reviews

Wadada Leo Smith, Bill Laswell, and Milford Graves: Sacred Ceremonies & Trumpet

by Mike Jurkovic
May 21, 2021

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 ...

Album Review

Wadada Leo Smith with Milford Graves and Bill Laswell: Sacred Ceremonies

Read "Sacred Ceremonies" reviewed by Karl Ackermann

by Karl Ackermann
May 8, 2021

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 ...

Album Review

Wadada Leo Smith / Douglas Ewart / Mike Reed: Sun Beans Of Shimmering Light

Read "Sun Beans Of Shimmering Light" reviewed by John Sharpe

by John Sharpe
April 16, 2021

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 ...

Radio & Podcasts

Wadada Leo Smith / Douglas R. Ewart / Mike Reed & Benoit Delbecq

by Maurice Hogue
March 3, 2021

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 ...

Album Review

Deerhoof and Wadada Leo Smith: To Be Surrounded By Beautiful, Curious, Breathing, Laughing Flesh Is Enough

Read "To Be Surrounded By Beautiful, Curious, Breathing, Laughing Flesh Is Enough" reviewed by Troy Dostert

by Troy Dostert
July 20, 2020

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 ...