Brooklyn Conservatory of Music is proud to present this rare Brooklyn performance of Wadada Leo Smith's Golden Quartet.
WADADA LEO SMITH'S GOLDEN QUARTET
Wadada Leo Smith - trumpet + flugelhorn
Anthony Davis - piano
John Lindberg - bass
Pheeroan akLaff - drums + percussion
One of the most original and important voices in American jazz, Wadada Leo Smith,is a trumpet player, multi-instrumentalist, composer, improviser, educator and music theorist/writer. A Mississippi native whose first musical experience was in marching and blues bands, Smith began playing trumpet when he was 12, encouraged by his stepfather, the blues guitarist Alex Wallace. After high school, Smith joined the Army, traveling overseas while playing in military bands. Smith moved to Chicago in the 1960s, where he studied at the Sherwood School of Music (1967-9), became a founding member of AACM (Association or the Advancement of Creative Music) and played in the Creative Construction Company (with Anthony Braxton, Leroy Jenkins, Muhal Richard Abrams, Richard Davis, and Steve McCall.) In the ‘70s, he moved to New Haven, Connecticut, where he founded a label to release his own music, Kabell, and a band, New Dalta Ahkri (Smith, Oliver Lake, Wes Brown, Henry Threadgill, Anthony Davis). Smith studied world music at Wesleyan University (1975-6) and independently began to develop and carefully document a unique system of musical notation, called Ahkreanvention and later, Ankhrasmation, that would underlay all of Smith’s original music.
Since Creative Music–1. came out in 1972, Smith has released nearly 30 albums as a leader. In addition to his own works, he has worked and recorded with numerous other artists, including Derek Bailey, Ed Blackwell, Carla Bley, Marion Brown, Don Cherry, Andrew Cyrille, Henry Kaiser, Roscoe Mitchell, Cecil Taylor, and ICP Orchestra co-founders Han Bennink and Misha Mengelberg. In recent years, Smith has released a number of critically acclaimed albums that are as striking for their diversity as for the purity of artistic vision uniting them all. Smith’s 2009 release Spiritual Dimension (Cuneiform), a double disc featuring the Golden Quartet on disc one, has been described as “an exceptional exemplar of Smith’s work as a bandleader and improviser” (PopMatters). In 2013, Smith released the Pulitzer Prize finalist, Ten Freedom Summers (Cuneiform), a sprawling four-disc tribute to the Civil Rights Movement thirty years in the making, featuring the Golden Quartet and the Los Angeles-based contemporary classical group Southwest Chamber Music. The Guardian described it as an “epic life's work... a landmark in jazz's rich canon.”
"Wadada is one of the most imaginative and explorative composers in creative music. His vision is uncompromising, his methods holistic and mystical. His playing is consistently brilliant and his sound is personal, with a clarity of tone recognizable after one note. His compositions have a special focus combining improvisation with written passages of extreme sensitivity and beauty... He is a National Treasure." – John Zorn
Support for this performance is provided by Chamber Music America and by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation.
