Wadada Leo Smith

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Wadada Leo Smith

Ishmael Wadada Leo Smith (born December 18, 1941 in Leland , Mississippi ) is an American trumpeter , composer and musicologist who is mainly active in the fields of creative jazz and new improvisation music . After Steve Lake , he has one of the most individual trumpet parts of the American jazz avant-garde. In addition to Lester Bowie - with a warmer, rounder sound than this - "he is considered the most important trumpeter of the Chicago avant-garde and, in a sense, its poet." According to Bert Noglik , he strives to be closely associated with jazz avant-gardists such as Anthony Braxton and Leroy Jenkins , “After musical renewal from the spirit of the Afro-American tradition. He works continuously on linking music theory research with multifaceted performance practice. "

Live and act

Smith initially received music lessons from his stepfather, blues singer and guitarist Alex "Little Bill" Wallace. He learned his main instrument during high school and deepened his formal music education during his military service in 1963. He first played drums , mellophone and french horn before focusing on the trumpet. He played in rhythm and blues bands and moved to Chicago in 1967, where he became a member of the Chicago AACM that same year . Together with Leroy Jenkins and Anthony Braxton , he founded the Trio Creative Construction Company . In 1971 his record label Kabell was founded. In the early 1970s he formed the band New Dalta Ahkri , in which Henry Threadgill , Anthony Davis and Oliver Lake played ( Wildflowers , 1976).

During the 1970s he studied ethnomusicology at Wesleyan University . Already during this time he designed concepts for solo performances and controlled collective improvisations and, despite clear roots in tradition, expanded the vocabulary of the instrument to include abstract timbres. He played with Anthony Braxton again, but also recorded with Derek Bailey 's Company and Gunter Hampel . From 1979 to 1982 he played in a trio with Peter Kowald and Günter Baby Sommer , which found a very open form of play. In 1983 the album The Blue Mountain's Sun Drummer was created in a duo with Ed Blackwell . In the mid-1980s, Smith became a Rastafarian and first used the name Wadada . Around 1990 he played regularly in New York City with Jeanne Lee . In addition to the trumpet and flugelhorn, which he also electronically alienates, Smith uses instruments from other musical cultures such as Kalimba , Atenteben (Ghanaian bamboo flute) or Koto ; he has also given courses on instrument making. His compositions are often graphically notated in their own system ( ankhrasmation ).

John Zorn produced the Golden Quartet , a supergroup in which Smith worked with Anthony Davis , Malachi Favors and Jack DeJohnette . In 1998 Smith released the album Yo, Miles! With guitarist Henry Kaiser . as a tribute to the rock jazz of Miles Davis . There Smith, Kaiser and numerous other musicians play cover versions, but also their own compositions that are inspired by this music. This tribute was also performed live with musicians from the Rova Saxophone Quartet . Since November 2005 he has been playing again with Baby Sommer (mostly in a duo). In autumn 2011 his great work Ten Freedom Summers was premiered in Los Angeles , which lasts three evenings and contains chamber music elements in addition to the Golden Quartet . In 2012 the album of the same name was released on Cuneiform .

Smith's recordings also include the solo albums Kulture Jazz (1992) and Red Sulfur Sky (2002), as well as Tao-Njia and Golden Heart Remembrance with his permanent group N'da Kulture , which has existed in variants since 1970 . In 2016 he presented America's National Parks .

Smith's teaching activities began in 1975/76 at the University of New Haven and led to teaching positions at the Creative Music Studio in Woodstock (New York) (1975 to 1978) and at Bard College (1987 to 1993) in 1993 to the Dizzy Gillespie Chair at the California Institute of the Arts , which he still holds.

Prizes and awards

Smith won the Down Beat Critics Poll in 1981 as a trumpeter . In 2013 he was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize with Ten Freedom Summers .

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Martin Kunzler Jazz-Lexikon , p. 1244
  2. ↑ Bert Noglik: Tableaus from Sound and Silence - A Portrait of the Trumpeter Leo Smith (2015) in Deutschlandfunk
  3. ↑ See Reclams Jazzlexikon , p. 490
  4. ↑ 2011 members of the Golden Quartet include Anthony Davis, John Lindberg and Susie Ibarra .
  5. ^ Larry Blumenfeld Ten Years in Three Nights: A Decade's Triumph Wall Street Journal . November 3, 2011
  6. ^ Wadada Leo Smith: Ten Freedom Summers at All About Jazz
  7. ^ Howard Reich: Pulitzer finalist Wadada Leo Smith symbolizes Chicago jazz power in the Chicago Tribune
personal data
SURNAME Smith, Wadada Leo
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Smith, Ishmael Wadada Leo; Smith, Leo
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American jazz musician
DATE OF BIRTH December 18, 1941
PLACE OF BIRTH Leland, Mississippi , USA