Year of the Elephant - press reviews

P r e s s R e v i e w s

BBC
Wadada Leo Smith's Golden Quartet
The Year of the Elephant

Like many of his Chicagoan colleagues, Wadada Leo Smith's work has stretched way beyond 'jazz' to include compositions for string quartet, studies of ethnic musics and free improvisation. As a trumpeter and composer, he's been responsible for some pretty amazing (and sometimes undervalued) music, from his 70s work with Anthony Braxton to the spiritual classic Divine Love and his Yo! Miles project with guitarist Henry Kaiser, which paid homage to Miles Davis' electric period.

The Golden Quartet line up was a dream Smith had nurtured for some 30 years till their formation in 2000. The dreaded word 'supergroup' may be in order here; we have pianist Anthony Davis (whose association with Smith stretches back to the mid 70s and who's no mean composer himself), legendary Art Ensemble of Chicago bassist Malachi Favors Maghostut, and the estimable Jack deJohnette (star drummer for Miles, Keith Jarrett and pretty much everyone else).

Smith, like Roscoe Mitchell, values space and the empathy shown by this band ensures that despite its all star nature, there's plenty of it. There's no free jazz scramble; instead the music has the coolly passionate feel of Miles's classic quintet in their late, just-going-electric mode. Think Filles de Kilimanjaro or Water Babies. Davis sprays ripples of Wurlitzer type electric piano over Favors and DeJohnette's warm, funk tinged swing or lays down plangent, rich chording on acoustic piano. His composers ear on alert, Davis achieves a fruity collision of classical form and improv fire.

Smith is on incendiary form; his rich, burnished tone echoes the effortless weight and authority of Miles, particularly on the opening 'Al Madinah'. His swooning harmon muted tones on the sumptuous ballad 'Piru' are tender, fragile and majestic in equal measure, while his duet with Davis on the episodic, through-composed "Kangaroo's Hollow" is a technical tour de force. Ideas are tossed round with bewildering speed throughout.

Favors is a towering presence as always; equipped with a warm, honeyed tone on the bass, his stately lines alternately float over or lock with DeJohnette's shifting, airy patterns. The drummer is predictably brilliant, though the rhythmic shoehorning that dominates the closing "Miles Star in 3 Parts" seems stiff and unwieldy, snuffing out any heat generated by the players. Mostly though, this is exploratory, passionate jazz that's made with love and skill by four singular talents; a supergroup in the truest sense of the word. Recommended.

- Peter Marsh

Pulse!
Wadada Leo Smith's Golden Quartet
The Year of the Elephant
**** (4 stars)

Trumpeter and composer Smith has been an unsung pioneer on the improvising music scene since the late '60s, recording chaste, challenging music on his own Kabell and other hard-to-find labels (a beautiful '78 album for ECM being the exception). This all-star band, though, should draw some much-deserved attention. The music pivots upon the supple bass work of Malachi Favors Maghostut (a founding member of the Art Ensemble of Chicago), with Jack DeJohnette (drummer alongside everyone from Miles Davis to Keith Jarrett) adding gauze-like cymbal play and fluid rhythmic commentary. On his own, pianist Anthony Davis has composed multicultural ensemble works and operas; here, he shadows Smith's alternately spiraling, sighing trumpet with reverberant electric keyboard chords (on the Miles-inspired groove of "Al-Madinah"), delicate acoustic piano filigree (the rhapsodic "Piru") and quick, chromatic curves ("Kangaroo's Hollow"). Golden indeed; the band's ethereal textures and incisive lyricism sound like no one else's.

- Art Lange

San Francisco Bay Guardian: 10.31.2001
Wadada Leo Smith's Golden Quartet
The Year of the Elephant

Smith has never renounced his affection for Miles Davis. Smith has been a longtime member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians and has collaborated with Anthony Braxton and many others, but his allegiance to Davis was evident in his pivotal participation in Yo Miles! projects with guitarist Henry Kaiser, and it surfaces again with his Golden Quartet.The touchstone here is less the jazz-rock of Davis's mid-'70s electric period (although the closing homage, "Miles Star in 3 Parts," boasts an indelibly funky hook) than the reflective spaciousness of such earlier transitional Davis albums as Filles de Kilimanjaro.

Individual resumes qualify this foursome, which first recorded for Tzadik in 2000, as a bona fide supergroup. Bassist Malachi Favors Maghostut has long anchored the Art Ensemble of Chicago. Jack DeJohnette drummed for Davis, records and tours with Keith Jarrett, and leads his own groups. And classically influenced pianist Anthony Davis has established himself as an esteemed composer of symphonic, chamber, choral, and operatic works (including X and Amistad). Pooling their talents within the loose-limbed harmonic and rhythmic frameworks of six Smith compositions, they communicate so fluidly that a listener can focus on each musician's contributions (Favors's warm, resilient bass lines, Davis's unique chordal ideas, and DeJohnette's proliferating patterns and occasionally Wurlitzer-like synth accents) while embracing the overall flow.

Smith, who teaches at Cal Arts, is especially brilliant, using his breath, lips, mute, and amplification to adjust his trumpet and flugelhorn tones to the mood of each piece, employing silence to dramatic effect, and balancing delicacy and brute force in his obliquely melodic blues-tinged solos. Pulling up far short of free jazz cacophony, The Year of the Elephant nonetheless embodies principles of empathetic improvisation across breathtaking vistas.

- Derk Richardson

Wadada Leo Smith's Golden Quartet
The Year of the Elephant
jazztimes.com
CD Reviews / December 2002

It is rare for an all-star lineup to live up to its attendant hype, but the musicians in Wadada Leo Smith's Golden Quartet are real stars, and their collaborative efforts on The Year of the Elephant are always sensitive and responsive and often surprising and challenging. An implicit aim here is to find balance among the four musical elements, and even though this is only the second recording by the Golden Quartet, the band is already breaking new ground. Smith frequently dips into the late Miles Davis bag he showcased on the very engaging Yo Miles a couple of years back. On the opening "Al-Madinah" he demonstrates how a great artist can pay homage to an earlier master without losing his identity, while Anthony Davis abstracts the standard approach to electric piano and Jack DeJohnette takes things a step or two further than he has in the jazz-rock context. Malachi Favors usually plays the repetitive lines we hear from electric bassists when the music goes in this direction but he still sounds like himself.

Even though '70s Miles is a frequent departure point for The Year of the Elephant, jazz-rock fans may not feel comfortable with the music while listeners who usually have trouble with rock-type rhythms may be amazed to hear them used in such a creative context. Similarly, those who have found Anthony Davis' work somewhat too impressionistic for their taste may find his approach perfectly suited to this context, much as fans of the Coltrane quartet didn't always buy McCoy Tyner's records. And Smith is so impressive; passionate one minute, obscure the next; here harsh, here gentle, and on occasion so slyly humorous that you'll laugh out loud.

DeJohnette is right at the top of his game while Favors adds his patented dark magic to the mix. But for all the outstanding individual contributions, the strongest impression is made by passages of collective interaction that are as varied, unpredictable and satisfying as classic New Orleans jazz or Chicago blues.

- Duck Baker