Bill Laswell, Wadada Leo Smith, and Milford Graves (photograph by Robert I. Sutherland-Cohen)
Over the course of this year, the highly inventive trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith is celebrating his 80th birthday, whose actual date will be this coming December 18. This coming Friday the Helsinki-based TUM Records will release a pair of three-CD box sets, both of which are now available for pre-order through Amazon.com. As its name suggests, Trumpet is a solo collection, which features four multi-movement compositions and a diversity of singles dedicated to colleagues and friends. The three CDs in the other collection, Sacred Ceremonies, present two duos and a trio. Smith is joined by drummer Milford Graves, who died this past February 12 at the age of 79, and bassist Bill Laswell. Smith plays with Graves on the first CD and with Laswell on the second CD. The final CD is then devoted to the group playing as a trio. Here, again, there are reflections on other individuals; but there are also what might be called “thoughts about humanity,” as in “Social Justice–A Fire for Reimagining the World,” which is the opening track on the trio CD.
All of this makes for a lot of listening. I have now progressed beyond my own “first impressions,” following up with “revisiting” encounters. Perhaps what is most important is that there is such a wealth of detail, particularly in Smith’s own work on both of these collections, that just beginning to get oriented around Smith’s vocabulary is a major undertaking. Personally, however, I have found that undertaking consistently rewarding, particularly when each new listening turns up subtleties in intonation, phrasing, or extended techniques.
I also have to say that the occasion of Graves’ death led me to focus on many of the details of his duo CD with Smith. I came away with the impression that Graves was particularly sensitive to pitch in at least some of the drums included in his kit. Smith was clearly aware of how Graves made those pitch selections, and could work around them as he played against the percussionist’s onslaught of eccentric rhythms.
In the Trumpet collection I was particularly struck by Smith’s decision to create a suite around Akira Kurosawa’s film Rashomon. I first encountered that film in my student days and have been consistently hooked on it throughout the decades that followed. For those unfamiliar with the work, it involves a murder which is described by a variety of different witnesses, each of whom relates the account in a different way that is totally inconsistent with all the others.
Smith’s suite is about 25 minutes in duration and is less interested in that “dissonance” of narratives and more interested in reflecting on the director’s efforts. Thus only the fourth of his piece’s five parts, which lasts only two and one-half minutes, involves “The Memories and Reflections,” while the opening part, entitled “The Film,” is almost six minutes in duration. Indeed, the longest part is the second, lasting about eight minutes. Entitled “The Killing,” it seems to suggest that Smith wanted to provide the one element that Kurosawa deliberately avoided, an omniscient observer capable of providing the “absolute truth” in contrast to the accounts of all the witnesses. (I have to confess that it is difficult for me to avoid speculating over whether Smith’s suite was a “response” to the “call” of Oliver Nelson’s The Blues and The Abstract Truth album.)
To be fair, I have to confess that I have developed my own techniques of sense-making when it comes to listening to Smith’s performances. My guess is that he would not object to this as a “listening strategy” (at least to the extent that he is willing to tolerate bringing a strategy to a listening experience). Over the course of a variety of encounters with his albums, I have come away with the impression that he wishes to provoke thought from his listeners without concern for what thoughts are actually formed, let alone articulated.
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