Pouring out musical ideas
What’s most impressive about Wadada Leo Smith’s late-career eruption isn’t so much the torrential volume of his output, though with the release of a dozen albums since 2012 featuring the trumpeter’s original works he’s making otherwise prolific composers look lazy.
The staggering aspect of his vast and varied oeuvre, which occupies a liminal zone between jazz and new music, is the scope of his aural ambition. He performs unaccompanied, like on his new album “Solo: Reflections and Meditations on Monk,” and in an electronics-laced duo with pianist Vijay Iyer, an ensemble that performed at SFJazz in February.
But Smith has gained the most attention with his ambitious multi-movement works that evoke entire geographical regions, like 2014’s “The Great Lakes Suites,” and sweeping historical events, most notably 2012’s epic Pulitzer Prize finalist “Ten Freedom Summers,” an orchestral four-disc project inspired by the civil rights movement.
“My focus has been to look at the world in which I live, and when you look out you see a lot of beautiful things in spite of all the problems in our soul-split nation,” says Smith, 75, who presents the Create Festival at the Lab in San Francisco on Friday-Saturday, Dec. 15-16, bringing together an astonishing collection of Bay Area and outof-town musicians and video artists in 14 different ensembles playing Smith’s music.
“We have things that don’t exist anywhere — national parks, canyons, sequoias, geysers. Those things to me are magnificent. They’re part of this country that I try to celebrate.”
Smith’s encompassing and often celebratory vision might seem surprising for an artist with deep roots in the 1960s avant-garde, but he’s always followed his own path. Born and raised in Mississippi, the trumpeter came of age musically in Chicago, where he was an early member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians.
The seminal African American arts collective pioneered a DIY approach to arts production while nurturing some of the era’s most inventive improvisers and composers, including several musicians who helped shape the Bay Area scene while teaching at Oakland’s Mills College, including Anthony Braxton, George Lewis and Roscoe Mitchell. “All of us engaged in very deep dialogues about art, and how you proceed in an environment that was essentially hostile to the art that you make,” Smith says.
Pianist Anthony Davis was an undergrad music student at Yale in the early 1970s when he started performing with Smith. The similarly ambitious composer is best known for operas like “X, The Life and Times of Malcolm X” and “Amistad,” and he joins the trumpeter on three sets at Create Festival, including a Golden Quintet performance focusing Smith’s 2016 double album “America’s National Parks” with bassist John Lindberg, cellist Ashley Walters, drummer Pheeroan akLaff and video artist Jesse Gilbert (the same cast as the album).
Davis, a professor of music at UC San Diego, is pleased but not surprised by Smith’s late-career creative deluge. “Wadada was always thinking in terms of bigger projects,” Davis says. “I always thought he was an amazing player and with a powerful concept of music formulated relatively early on. He always had such a strong musical presence. I think it’s a long overdue emergence to prominence.”
Smith’s remarkable output has brought him to the center of the jazz scene after decades on the periphery. The Jazz Journalists Association voted him 2017’s musician of the year and duo of the year for his work with Iyer, after Smith won trumpeter of the year in 2016.
While he’s been a scarce presence in the Bay Area in recent years, Smith has some deep local ties. Starting in the late 1990s, he and guitarist Henry Kaiser teamed up for Yo Miles!, releasing three double albums focusing on the seminal electric music of jazz icon Miles Davis. Kaiser plans to join the trumpeter for a quartet set Saturday at the festival, which Smith is producing himself with support from a Doris Duke Charitable Foundation fellowship.
In much the same way that his compositional vision continues to expand to the horizon, Smith created Create Festival as a vehicle to disseminate his ever-multiplying body of music. Launched in the spring, the event is based in New Haven, Conn., where he moved to be close to his four grandchildren after two decades on the faculty at Cal Arts.
“I thought about presenting it in L.A., but I performed at the Lab last year and really enjoyed the space,” Smith says. “It’ll always be in New Haven, because it’s nice to have something to do at home. Hopefully over the years, I can spread it out in various ways across the country. It’s difficult work because I’m playing so much each night, but it’s rewarding because I get a chance to expose a lot of different viewpoints.”