P
r e s s Q u o
t e s
"Leo
Smith is a remarkable young trumpet
player and percussionist..."
--- Peter Occhiogrosso, Soho Weekly News
"Leo Smith is a trumpeter and composer at the forefront of the
New Creative Music..."
--- Bob Ness, Down Beat
"Leo Smith is the poet of the AACM."
--- Bob Blumenthal, Down Beat
"Leo Smith is one of the most vital musicians on the planet today ... To
say that Smith is a highly original player would be an understatement."
--- Bill Shoemaker, Coda
"Smith is a player of great gifts..."
--- David Skiles, Coda
"Smith's trumpet mastery is unquestionable..."
--- Litweiler, Down Beat
"Smith's
horn style is saturated with the history of the modern jazz trumpet...
There is much of Miles Davis in Smith's playing of the "silences"... and there are deep shades
of Fats Navarro in Smith's essentially "melodic", lyrical, even "classical"
technique which remains firmly grounded in traditional ideas of
tonal "beauty".
--- Thomas Albright., San Francisco Chronicle
"Mr. Smith is a careful improvisor... in this idiom (shifting instrumental
colors and thematically oriented improvisations) Mr. Smith has few peers..."
--- Robert Palmer, New York Times
"There is a remarkable cleanliness to Smith's music."
--- Gary Giddens,
Village Voice
"....long arching phrases flow from Smith's horn..."
--- Staples, Down Beat
New York Times Review of Golden Quartet Performance
Wadada Leo Smith
and Alan Kushan
Merkin Concert Hall
by Nate Chinen
Saturday December 3, 2005
THE WIRE
SUONI PER Il POPOLO
LA SA LA ROSSA/ CASA DEL POPOLO
MONTREAL, CANADA
BY BENOIT CHAPUT & BYRON COLEY
Montreal's Suoni Per Il Popolo festival is different from many others in that it was not initially conceived as a jazz festival. Programmed to take up almost the entire month of June, at one large venue (Sala) and one small one (Casa), the invited artists have always been more a function of the promoters' wide-ranging taste for liberation than anything doctrinaire. There's also a manifest commitment to presenting new (sometimes unlikely) pairings, with results ranging from the spectacular to the disastrous. But those are the rewards and punishments of running an aesthetically free festival. Friction is a natural byproduct.
No reason to dwell on the dysfunctional couplings, except for the Peter Brotzmann & Sam Shalabi duet, which was one of the festival's most hotly anticipated nights. Multi-instrumentalist Shalabi was playing electric guitar, Brotzmann had his usual complement of woodwinds. The night before, Brotzmann had played a great, openly communicative set with drummer Nasheet Waits. Waits seemed too deep into an Art Blakey African Beat mode and the whole thing clicked. Consequently, tongues were damp with anticipation for the next night. But from the start, Shalabi and Brotzmann cohered far less than hoped. Shalabi's amp blew up and, following a break, things went further awry. The replacement amp was quite a bit louder than the first, and it was pointed directly at Brotzmann. So when Shalabi started channeling Rudolph Grey, Brotzmann was sonically swamped. Tension built for a while, then communication seemed to completely break down, and Brotzmann left the stage abruptly. Hard to figure out exactly what transpired, but it was a real disappointment, since the parts of their collaboration that did cohere were incredible.
Equally heavy, though much more rewarding, was the solo trumpet set by Wadada Leo Smith. The sound was extremely minimal and quiet. Throughout, Smith looked as cool as a beatific university professor and as concentrated as a star cluster. He has such a commanding mastery of delicate forms that the organic waves of sound he created turned everyone's heads inside out. During his two sets, the big room took on the feel of a religious retreat, and rivers of karmic goodness flowed like the purest honey.
Second
Thoughts
by Alan Rich -
LA Weekly,
November 1-7, 1996
You could
not mistake last week's California EAR Unit program, opening the
Monday Evening Concerts series at the County Museum, for anything
out of the convoluted worlds of Ives or Mahler, yet the element
of eclecticism
was an important motivating force here as well. The essence of
pop -jazz, improv, even a ballad or two - provided much of the
coloration in five large-scale works meant to be heard in a concert
context (i.e., respectful silence, with applause only at the end).
Some of it worked.
It worked especially well when, for the final work, the great
improv trumpeter Wadada
Leo Smith blazed his way through his Tao-Njia
with the ensemble in hot pursuit: sinuous, smoky waves of sound
freely bending, darting off in immaculately controlled explosions
ending (as doesn't always happen in new music) far too soon against
the audience's hopes.
A
Lot of Night Music
by Alan Rich -
LA Weekly, March 28 - April 3,1997
Monday,
March 17. The CalArts contingent took over tonight's Green Umbrella
concert at the Japan America Theater as part of the school's annual
springtime new-music festival. I can remember earlier festivals
- from around 1978, say - as genuinely horizon- expanding events,
gatherings of worldwide innovators with new and challenging definitions
of what music is all about.John Cage showed up, and Morty Feldman
and Iannis Xenakis; for a couple of weeks each year we all felt
suspended over a precipice. Has that spirit truly died? Tonight
we had composers pushing notes around, justifying themselves by
proclaiming alliances with grand bygone philosophies; the crackle
of dry bones resounded through the hall. And then, in the last
piece, Leo
Wadada Smith's Nur; Luminous: Light Upon Light, a roomful of reawakened hearers followed Bert Turetzky's solo
double bass down a long, resonant corridor, and at the end the
solo oboe of Allan Vogel rose like a shaft of clear light and
traced a jazz tune, pure and beautiful. We had waited through
two hours in the gloomy reaches of other people's solemn, self-congratulatory
note spinning in hopes for this kind of light at the end. There,
finally, it was.
© 1997-2007 Ishmael Wadada Leo Smith
|
