Wadada Leo Smith’s Box of Five Duo Sets

Readers may recall that this past Wednesday saw an article discussing the seven-CD set of the first twelve string quartets composed by jazz trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith. That article began by observing that the album was one in “a series of releases on his ‘house label,’ the Helsinki-based TUM Records.” The day on which the quartet collection was released also saw the TUM release of a five-CD collection entitled The Emerald Duets.

Wadada Leo Smith and Andrew Cyrille (photograph by Enid Farber)

For the most part, all of the duets were scored for trumpet and drums. One of the drummers, Jack DeJohnette, joined Smith on the last two of the CDs in the set, entitled, respectively, Freedom Summer, the Legacy and Paradise: The Gardens and Fountains. The drummers on the first three CDs and the respective album titles are as follows:

1. Pheeroan akLaff: Litanies, Prayers and Meditations
2. Andrew Cyrille: Havana, Cuba
3. Han Bennink: Mysterious Sonic Fields

While all of the CD titles suggest narrative infrastructures, it would be fair to say that the performances themselves have more to do with reflection than with denotation. Indeed, one of the compositions, entitled “The Patriot Act, Unconstitutional and a Force that Destroys Democracy,” is performed with three of the drummers: akLaff, Cyrille, and DeJohnette. Given the diversity of the CD titles, it would be fair to say that each of those performances emerges from its own context. The same can be said of the two performances with akLaff given the title “Meditation from the Heart.” (The remainder of the title involves the nouns “beauty” and “beloved,” which reverse order between the first and second performances.)

In the overall context it would be fair to say that Smith put as much literary effort into naming his CDs and their tracks as he put into his duo performances with the albums’ respective drummers. His choices of words are highly personal, so much so that many listeners may be a bit perplexed about any connection between words and music. However, my own opinion is that the words do little more than provide the listener with some sense of context, which may then facilitate the connotations of the music itself in both solo and duo realizations.

It goes without saying than none of the tracks in this collection can be dismissed as sit-back-and-listen music. However, if focused attention is both necessary and sufficient, the listener should be willing to accept that it only arrives to those willing to engage in repeated listening experiences over some extended period of time. Mind you, such an approach applies just as much to encounters with the late string quartets of Ludwig van Beethoven or the almost microscopic compositions of Anton Webern. (My own first encounter with this methodology involved the second string quartet by Elliott Carter.)

It is worth noting that the concept of “music-making” shows up in the booklet texts provided by both Smith and Vijay Iyer. I like to invoke the phrase “the music is in the making” to encourage listeners to put aside “physically static artifacts” such as scores and liner notes. Music only emerges through the immediacy of listening itself. While the five CDs in this collection are “static artifacts,” there is still a spontaneity that can be teased out every time one of the tracks is played. Even when one becomes familiar with any specific track, one may still come to terms with the spontaneous actions behind the capture of a performance for the sake of producing a CD track.