{"id":698,"date":"2013-05-03T21:00:50","date_gmt":"2013-05-03T21:00:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/?p=698"},"modified":"2013-05-05T21:24:17","modified_gmt":"2013-05-05T21:24:17","slug":"wadada-leo-smith-ten-freedom-summers-the-triumph-of-creative-music","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/?p=698","title":{"rendered":"Wadada Leo Smith, “Ten Freedom Summers” & The Triumph of “Creative Music”"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\"Wadada_Leo_Smith_in_front_of_projection_of_LBJ_signing_Voting_Rights_Act__1964_Ten_Freedom_Summers__October__2011_copyright_2011_Lyn_Horton_depth1\"<\/a><\/p>\n

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The best jazz recording of 2012, much like science or magic, doesn\u2019t easily yield its secrets \u2013 which is the main reason it didn\u2019t make my Top-10 list<\/a>. I simply didn\u2019t get to it all in time. Still, with or without me (and gratifyingly so), Wadada Leo Smith\u2019s Ten Freedom Summers <\/i>has by now received most of the formal acclamation it deserves: Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in music, awards from the Jazz Journalists Association for Smith as musician and trumpeter of the year<\/a>, a three-night live premiere last week at the Roulette in Brooklyn. I suspect that once the four-disc set on Cuneiform Records seeps into the shared consciousness of receptive listeners, it will continue to provoke, haunt and inspire. The greatest music \u2013 the greatest anything \u2013 doesn\u2019t end when you stop absorbing it. Your reactions, primary and secondary, are part of the artistic process. They\u2019re supposed to be, anyway.<\/p>\n

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Each of the nineteen compositions in Smith\u2019s five-plus-hour opus announces itself as a chapter in American history from the 1857 Dred Scott case to the 9\/11 terrorist attacks. But the thematic core of Ten Freedom Summers,<\/i> as its title suggests, is the decade of national transformation that began with the 1954 Supreme Court decision declaring school segregation unconstitutional and the 1964 summer that saw both Congress\u2019s passage of the most sweeping civil-rights legislation since Reconstruction and the Mississippi \u201cFreedom Summer\u201d Project during which activists risked (and lost) their lives trying to enfranchise the state\u2019s besieged African-Americans. With Smith on trumpet leading both his Golden Quartet\/Quintet of pianist Anthony Davis, bassist John Lindberg, percussionists Pheeroan ak-Laff and Susie Ibarra and the nine-member Southwest Chamber Music Ensemble conducted by Jeff von der Schmidt, the work spools forth as a meticulous inventory of mood more than a sweeping pageant of struggle. It doesn\u2019t chronicle its noteworthy events so much as search for their deeper emotional currents and, in doing so, compels the listener to react to history beyond text and shadow \u2013 and even further beyond the blithely-dispensed shorthand of newsreels, archival photos and sound bites.<\/p>\n

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I wonder, though, whether I\u2019m probing or merely projecting whenever I hear some of its chapters. Just to take one example, the piece entitled, \u201cRosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott, 381 Days.\u201d It begins with a major-key dirge by Smith\u2019s trumpet, with a tone and tempo reminiscent of such mid-1960s elegiac milestones as Lee Morgan\u2019s \u201cSearch for the New Land\u201d and John Coltrane\u2019s \u201cA Love Supreme.\u201d One can easily interpret this table-setting incantation as signaling the no-turning-back-now gesture by Parks in her epoch-making refusal to sit in the back of an Alabama public transport. Then, for several bars afterward, a chugging 4\/4 beat, driven by ak-Laff with bouncy strides, conveys the \u201c381 Days\u201d of the resultant boycott, which forced hundreds of domestics, office workers and laborers to walk instead of ride to work and shop, thus representing the first of the era\u2019s significant civil-rights marches.<\/p>\n

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I\u2019m confident I\u2019ve sussed that out correctly. But when I hear the strains of bluesy strutting at either end of \u201cThurgood Marshall and Brown Vs. Board of Education: A Dream of Equal Education,\u201d am I being cued to imagine the swagger and bravado of its eponymous heroic lawyer making his way through several litigious hurdles to reach his finish line at the Highest Court in the Land?\u00a0 And would I know enough to respond to such cues if I didn\u2019t know what its title was? Or, for that matter, know who Thurgood Marshall was and the kind of ribald, larger-than-life figure he was?<\/p>\n

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\"Ten<\/a><\/p>\n

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It helps to know the history behind the music. But it\u2019s not necessary. Because even if you can sense why Smith and his musicians make the choices in what they play and how they extend their ideas (together or separately), it\u2019s the spacious-skies expansiveness of the concept itself, its willingness to do the unexpected \u2013 a segment on the \u201cBlack Church\u201d that\u2019s all swirling chamber music and no gospel tropes whatsoever \u2013 and let you deal with its implications, that allow you to sense that \u201cfreedom\u201d is far more than the theme of Smith\u2019s work here. It\u2019s both his method and his objective.<\/p>\n

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Smith, after all, was forged in the crucible of what, for want of a better description, we still label \u201cavant-garde jazz.\u201d And what would<\/i> be a better description? There are so many options. Some like \u201cprogressive jazz,\u201d though you kind of feel an anachronistic draft when you hear those words. Others cling to such sixties taglines as \u201cNew Thing,\u201d \u201cFourth Stream,\u201d \u201cOutside\u201d and even \u201cFree Jazz,\u201d though some of the renegades of subsequent decades embraced old-school polyphony that kept things flying in fairly close order. Gary Giddins quixotically tried to coin the word, \u201cparajazz\u201d (or was it \u201cPara-Jazz\u201d?) as an all-purpose umbrella. I like it, but I can\u2019t find anybody else who does.<\/p>\n

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I also like \u201ccreative music\u201d — bringing us back to Smith, who was part of the groundbreaking Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) that nurtured and\/or inspired such experimentalists as Henry Threadgill, Anthony Braxton, Roscoe Mitchell, Joseph Jarman, George Lewis, Leroy Jenkins and many more. Their music was as idiosyncratic, original and unconventional as they were. Jazz fans who drew their lines at whatever Miles Davis was doing in 1965 (if not sooner) thought the AACM and their kind were too \u201cway out\u201d to even taste. But back in the seventies, I warmed to the freewheeling, sometimes breakneck invention of the renegades. It\u2019s true they made mosaics out of traditional rhythmic pattern and carried thematic ideas down dark alleys and wooded glades you never thought of visiting. But as with avant-gardists of the past, they weren\u2019t upending the order-out-of-chaos imperative of art as much as encouraging listeners to re-fashion or, at least, reconsider their own notions of order. In other words, they weren\u2019t the only ones creating the music; you had to join in the process, too. And where previous generations did so by dancing, we did it by thinking or feeling our way through the changes.<\/p>\n

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Smith, now 71, has for decades advanced his own vision of creativity into finding new ways of fusing improvisation and notation. (He explains this process in far greater detail here<\/a>, though, as with his music, one run-through won\u2019t be enough.) Ten Freedom Summers <\/i>uses the late 20th<\/sup> century\u2019s upheaval to apply firmer context to the process. Those unaccustomed to such compulsively creative composition may think it\u2019s haphazard, even if they know the historical facts being represented or dramatized. But as it was with the avant-garde\u2019s loft concerts of the 1970s or for that matter, some of the late, lamented Knitting Factory\u2019s wilder nights of the 1990s, the whole idea was to listen and to be attentive always for whatever is familiar in one\u2019s own memory, private or public, and for what could be something you never knew before. From such surprises, you can make your own connections to this freedom struggle \u2013 or any other such struggle you can imagine. It may well have been this openness to possibility that the Pulitzer committee recognized in almost-but-not-quite giving their top prize to Ten Freedom Summers. <\/i>If so, then it\u2019s a whole way of thinking about music, and not just jazz, that\u2019s received its just desserts.<\/p>\n

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    The best jazz recording of 2012, much like science or magic, doesn\u2019t easily yield its secrets \u2013 which is the main reason it didn\u2019t make my Top-10 list. I simply didn\u2019t get to it all in time. Still, with or without me (and gratifyingly so), Wadada Leo Smith\u2019s Ten Freedom Summers has by […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[107],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-698","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-jazz-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/698","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=698"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/698\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":705,"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/698\/revisions\/705"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=698"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=698"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=698"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}