Ten Freedom Summers

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Ten Freedom Summers
Live album by Wadada Leo Smith

Publication
(s)

2012

Label (s) Cuneiform Records

Format (s)

CD

Genre (s)

jazz

Title (number)

19th

running time

273: 48

occupation
  • Southwest Chamber Music
  • Harp : Alison Bjorkedal
  • Double bass: Tom Peters
  • Percussion: Lynn Vartan
  • Violin: Shalini Vijayan
  • Head: Jeff von der Schmidt

production

Southwest Chamber Music, Wadada Leo Smith

Studio (s)

Zipper Hall, Los Angeles

chronology
Dark Lady of the Sonnets
(2011) 		Ten Freedom Summers Anchestors
(2012)

Ten Freedom Summers is a jazz album by Wadada Leo Smith that was recorded November 4-6 , 2011 at the Zipper Hall of the Colburn School in Los Angeles. The box set consisting of four CDs was released in May 2012 by Cuneiform Records . Smith wrote a total of 34 years on the 19 compositions for this project, beginning in 1977. He was accompanied by the nine-member Southwest Chamber Music Ensemble and his own jazz quartet, which included drummers Pheeroan akLaff and Susie Ibarra , pianist Anthony Davis and include bassist John Lindberg . When it was released, Ten Freedom Summers received positive feedback from music critics and was considered Smith's most musically ambitious work.

Music of the album

The work Ten Freedom Summers , which was influenced by both free jazz and contemporary music , consisted of 19 pieces, most of which are presented in the form of a suite . Thematically, the work deals with the Afro-American civil rights movement (1955–1968) and related topics. Smith cites the regulations of racial segregation in his home state Mississippi and August Wilson's piece The Pittsburgh Cycle as sources of inspiration for his composition.

The Colburn School, where Ten Freedom Summers was admitted.

Smith began working on his first compositions for Ten Freedom Summers in 1977 when he wrote the piece Medgar Evers in memory of the civil rights activist of the same name who was shot in Mississippi in 1963. In the years that followed, Smith continued to work on the project, on which he spent 34 years, supported by several grants and composition commissions, such as the Southwest Chamber Music Ensemble. Between 2009 and 2011 he finally completed the work. Smith was inspired by August Wilson's theater series The Pittsburgh Cycle . Smith commented on the idea behind Ten Freedom Summers as follows:

I was born in 1941 and grew up in segregated Mississippi and experienced the conditions which made it imperative for an activist movement for equality. I saw that stuff happening. Those are the moments that triggered this. It was in that same environment that I had my first dreams of becoming a composer and performer.

Ten Freedom Summers premiered on three evenings November 4-6, 2011 at Zipper Hall in Los Angeles. 19 compositions were played; Smith was accompanied by both his Golden Quartet and the nine-member Southwest Chamber Music Ensemble under the direction of Jeff von der Schmidt, with both ensembles on some pieces.

The composition

The 19 pieces by Ten Freedom Summers , consisting of four and a half hours of music, are arranged in the form of a suite, three of which last over 20 minutes. According to Smith, there were no underlying motives . Instead of his own method of notation , called ankhrasmation , Smith wrote Ten Freedom Summers with a traditionally notated arrangement. His Golden Quartet plays idioms rooted in blues and jazz, the Southwest Chamber Music Ensemble used violin, viola, cello, harp, double bass, glockenspiel, bass clarinet, flute, tympani, marimba, gongs and various percussion instruments. Smith himself takes on Miles Davis ' atmospheric aesthetic in his trumpet play , whose gloomy mood refers to the individual tracks.

The compositions are arranged in three main sections - Defining Moments in America, What Is Democracy? and Freedom Summers . Each piece in these parts describes musically significant figures who are connected to the Afro-American civil rights movement between 1954 and 1964 and relates to social institutions such as the government, the media and social groups. According to Jeff Dayton-Johnson ( All About Jazz ) the composition relates to characters and events such as Malcolm X , Martin Luther King , Brown vs. Board of Education , Medgar Evers and the Little Rock Nine , thematically expanding into the American past (the Dred Scott case in 1857) and the more recent past (with 9/11 ), and a number of cross-references to democracy, freedom of the press and the Black Church .

reception

According to Josh Langhoff in PopMatters, the pieces on the album transform their “subjects into musical inventions and moods; they are neither verbatim nor programmatic. ”Langhoff sees similarities to contemporary classical compositions in the use of abstractions. John Fordham wrote in the Guardian that Smith, with both his jazz quartet and the classical ensemble, "conventional themes or sustained pulses mostly branched out from the language of free jazz and contemporary classical music." Daniel Spicer characterized the music in the BBC as a " Mixture of serious contemporary composition [...] and turbulent free jazz ”. In Bob Rusch's opinion , it is not so much influenced by musicians close to the civil rights movement such as Paul Robeson , Pete Seeger , Mahalia Jackson or Aretha Franklin , as Smith's Golden Quintet spreads an astral, chamber music sound instead .

Ten Freedom Summers received consistently positive reviews from music journalists; at Metacritic it received a rating of 99% based on eight reviews. Bill Shoemaker called it "a monumental evocation of the American civil rights movement" in The Wire . Phil Johnson gave the CD box five stars in the Independent and it was "extraordinarily lucrative, like Miles Davis , who played Ligeti in his middle period ." Thom awarded in Allmusic Jurek starred the album 4½ (out of 5) and referred to it as Smith's "Opus Magnum", which belongs in the jazz canon with Duke Ellington's Black Brown & Beige and Max Roach's Freedom Now Suite . John Fordham gave the box set four (out of five) stars in the Guardian and called it "a landmark in the rich canon of jazz." Daniel Spicer ( BBC Music ) considers it "further classic" or "consciousness-expanding jazz". Glen Hall wrote in Exclaim! , who "echoed in Smith's music the suffering and dreams of a better life that make the decade 1954-1964 the subject of this powerful compendium of compositions."

In the meeting in musicOMH Daniel Paton went to the strong spiritual dimension of music and stated: There's even Josh Langhoff was the album in "a radical, passionate aspect in the execution of these compositions, which is individually energized and strong." PopMatters the Highest rating of 10 points and said of the sound, "The palpable, physically beautiful sounds of Smith's commanding trumpet in combination with the various instruments push their own limits." He concludes that Wadada Leo Smith. "In four and a half hours America's definitive." Record events in sound, and with them the story of all of us ”In contrast, Bob Rusch, in his contribution to Cadence Magazine , said that the work would have benefited from being split into four separate albums; he described listening as "arduous, but also as involved and inspiring."

Ten Freedom Summers was named one of the best albums of the year in 2012 by Allmusic, All About Jazz , JazzTimes , and Chicago Reader ; Bret Saunders named it the best jazz album of the year in The Denver Post . It reached # 31 on The Wire's best album list of the year. In 2013 the album was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize .

Track list

  • Wadada Leo Smith: Ten Freedom Summers (Cuneiform Records - Rune 350/351/352/353)

Disc 1

  1. Dred Scott: 1857-11:48
  2. Malik Al Shabazz and the People of the Shahada - 5:15
  3. Emmett Till: Defiant, Fearless - 6:02 pm
  4. Thurgood Marshall and Brown vs. Board of Education: A Dream of Equal Education, 1954 - 3:05 pm
  5. John F. Kennedy's New Frontier and the Space Age, 1960 - 22:08

Disc 2

  1. Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott, 381 Days - 12:43
  2. Black Church - 16:35
  3. Freedom Summer: Voter Registration, Acts of Compassion and Empowerment, 1964 - 12:34
  4. Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society and the Civil Rights Act of 1964-24:12

Disc 3

  1. Freedom Riders Ride - 16:40
  2. Medgar Evers: A Love-Voice of a Thousand Years' Journey for Liberty and Justice - 10:07
  3. DC Wall: A War Memorial for All Times - 12:17
  4. Buzzsaw: The Myth of a Free Press - 3:03 pm
  5. Little Rock Nine: A Force for Desegregation in Education, 1957-13:49

Disc 4

  1. America, Parts 1, 2 & 3 - 14:11
  2. September 11th, 2001: A Memorial - 9:39
  3. Fannie Lou Hamer and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, 1964-8:36
  4. Democracy - 14:30
  5. Martin Luther King, Jr: Memphis, the Prophecy - 20:34

Edition history

country date Label format
Canada May 8, 2012 Cuneiform Records CD
Japan May 20, 2012
Great Britain May 21, 2012
May 22, 2012 Download
United States CD, download

further reading

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Wadada Leo Smith's Golden Quartet . Cuneiform Records . Retrieved January 15, 2013.
  2. ^ Greg Burk: Wadada Leo Smith's opus . In: Los Angeles Times , October 23, 2011. Retrieved January 15, 2013. 
  3. ↑ a b c d Lyn Horton: Wadada Leo Smith: Ten Freedom Summers . In: JazzTimes . , Quincy5. November 2011. Retrieved January 20, 2013.
  4. ↑ a b c Thom Jurek: Ten Freedom Summers - Wadada Leo Smith . Allmusic . Rovi Corporation . Retrieved January 15, 2013.
  5. ^ A b c Jeff Dayton-Johnson: Wadada Leo Smith: Ten Freedom Summers . In: All About Jazz . Vision X software . Pp. 1-3. June 18, 2012. Archived from the original on November 11, 2012. Retrieved on November 11, 2012.
  6. ↑ Mark Redlefsen: Wadada Leo Smith: Ten Freedom Summers . In: All About Jazz . Vision X software. June 25, 2012. Retrieved January 19, 2013.
  7. ↑ a b Josh Langhoff: Wadada Leo Smith: Ten Freedom Summers . PopMatters . August 31, 2012. Retrieved January 15, 2013.
  8. ^ A b John Fordham: Ishmael Wadada Leo Smith: Ten Freedom Summers - review . In: The Guardian , August 30, 2012. Retrieved January 15, 2013. 
  9. ^ A b Daniel Spicer: Review of Wadada Leo Smith - Ten Freedom Summers . BBC Music . June 14, 2012. Retrieved January 16, 2013.
  10. ↑ a b Bob Rusch: Papatamus . In: Cadence Magazine . 39, No. 1, Portland, January-February-March 2013, ISSN  0162-6973 , pp. 55-56.
  11. ^ Ten Freedom Summers Reviews, Ratings, Credits, and More . Metacritic . CBS Interactive . Retrieved November 11, 2012.
  12. ^ Bill Shoemaker: Review: Ten Freedom Summers . In: The Wire . , London May 2012.
  13. ↑ Phil Johnson: Album: Wadada Leo Smith, Ten Freedom Summers (Cuneiform) . In: The Independent , June 3, 2012. Retrieved January 15, 2013. 
  14. ↑ Glen Hall: Wadada Leo Smith - Ten Freedom Summers . In: Exclaim! . , Toronto29. May 2012. Retrieved January 16, 2013.
  15. ^ Daniel Paton: Wadada Leo Smith - Ten Freedom Summers . musicOMH . Retrieved January 15, 2013.
  16. ↑ Staff: AllMusic's Favorite Jazz Albums of 2012 . Allmusic. Rovi Corporation. December 24, 2012. Retrieved March 17, 2013.
  17. ^ John Sharpe: John Sharpe's Best Releases of 2012 . In: All About Jazz . Vision X software. December 26, 2012. Retrieved March 17, 2013.
  18. ↑ JazzTimes' Top 50 CDs: Individual Ballots . In: JazzTimes . , Quincy2. January 2013. Retrieved March 17, 2013.
  19. ↑ Peter Margasak: My favorite jazz albums of 2012 . In: Chicago Reader , December 28, 2012. Retrieved March 17, 2013. 
  20. ^ Bret Saunders: Top ten jazz albums of 2012 . In: The Denver Post , December 23, 2012. Retrieved March 17, 2013. 
  21. ↑ 2012 Rewind . In: The Wire . No. 347, London, January 2013.
  22. ↑ http://www.cuneiformrecords.com/emails/wls-tfs-pulitzer-finalist.html
  23. ↑ http://www.discogs.com/Wadada-Leo-Smith-Ten-Freedoms-Summers/release/3565068
  24. ↑ Ten Freedom Summers: 4CD . HMV Canada . Archived from the original on November 13, 2012. Retrieved November 13, 2012.
  25. ↑ Ten Freedom Summers ( Japanese ) HMV Japan. Archived from the original on November 13, 2012. Retrieved November 13, 2012.
  26. ^ Wadada Leo Smith: Ten Freedom Summers: 4cd (2012) . HMV UK. Archived from the original on November 11, 2012. Retrieved November 11, 2012.
  27. ^ Ten Freedom Summers (2012) . 7digital . Archived from the original on November 11, 2012. Retrieved November 11, 2012.
  28. ↑ Wadada Leo Smith - Ten Freedom Summers CD Album . CD Universe . Muze . Archived from the original on November 11, 2012. Retrieved November 11, 2012.