Wadada Leo Smith’s New Electric Band

Many readers probably know by now that Wadada Leo Smith celebrated his 80th birthday on December 18, 2021. That date marked the beginning of a prodigious number of diverse releases over the course of 2022. One of the first to be released was A Love Sonnet for Billie Holiday, but there were less-expected collections such as The Chicago Symphonies, a seven-CD set of twelve string quartets, and the five-CD The Emerald Duets, each CD pairing Smith with a different colleague.

Cover of Fire Illuminations (photograph by Einar Falur Ingólfsson)

Smith’s embrace of unlikely sources of diversity has followed him into his 81st year. Today sees his latest venture in the form of a digital-only release of Fire Illuminations. To record this album he assembled a new ensemble called Orange Wave Electric. This is an all-star electric band whose members include guitarists Nels Cline, Brandon Ross, and Lamar Smith, bassists Bill Laswell and Melvin Gibbs, electronic musician Hardedge, percussionist Mauro Refosco, and drummer Pheeroan akLaff.

The album consists of only five tracks and lasts for a little under 50 minutes. The two long tracks are both a little over 15 minutes in duration. The first of these is “Ntozake,” the opening track named after the poet Ntozake Shange, best known as the author of the play For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enuf, which won an Obie Award in 1975. (Reasonable minds may differ; I never got beyond the line “I am a poet” being repeated too many times!) The second is “Tony Williams,” the fourth track named after the drummer in the quintet formed by Miles Davis in 1964, which lasted into 1968. After leaving the quintet, Williams formed the Tony Williams Lifetime trio with John McLaughlin on guitar and Larry Young on organ.

Two of the tracks are reflections on Muhammad Ali. “Muhammad Ali’s Spiritual Horizon,” a little under four minutes in duration, is the second track on the album. The final track is “Muhammad Ali and George Forman’s Rumble in Zaire Africa” and is about twice as long. The remaining track is the one that evokes the album title. “Fire Illuminations Inside Light Particles” is about four and a half minutes long.

According to the advance material I received, Smith associated the “Fire Illuminations” composition with “the transformative nature of fire itself, and its foundational role in the development of human civilization.” However, I have to confess that I was drawn more to the second half of the title. As an undergraduate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), I learned of the “ambiguity” of light: Some of its properties were, indeed, those of particles; but others could only be explained as the behavior of waves. This is not to suggest that the music is ambiguous. Nevertheless, there is some sense of “notes as particles” in Smith’s phrasing, while the electronic accompaniment is decidedly wave-like!

Let me be clear, however: one does not need a Bachelor’s degree from MIT to appreciate the inventive approach that Smith takes to his trumpet work or the electronic “environment” in which his thematic lines evolve!