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Wadada Leo Smith: Kulture Jazz |
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Friday, 13 January 2006 19:24 |
Wadada Leo Smith
Kulture Jazz
ECM Records
By John Sinclair
Leo Smith's music, like all great art, is a graph of the heart and mind of its creator. His solo music traces even more precisely the contours of his thoughts and feelings. Alone, surrounded by the space which defines his place in time, calm and deliberate, he addresses his little human songs to the air around him, speaking his peace with trumpet, flugelhorn, mbira, koto, bamboo flute, harmonica, percussions, through his own voice and words.
Leo trusts the air to carry his music to its audience, to the world of flesh and blood and suffering as well as to the spirit world of the ancestors from whence it came. "Jazz is a music that comes directly from God," he emphasizes, citing Art Blakey, "through the artist, directly into the heart of the audience (or as I say, the sufferer). Jazz is a direct road to God."
Leo's identification with the jazz idiom--the Kulture of Jazz, as he says it--is as complete as it may be unexpected, for it represents a serious coming to terms with the historical development of the music and the people who have created it as a means of giving expression to the forms and the terms of their lives.
"The Kulture of Jazz is just what it says," Leo affirms, "because African people were forced into slavery for a moment, and God gave them this music because they needed something which could not be taken away. When Black people came to this country they brought the kulture with them, and it was retained through the process of epic memory. Jazz could not be destroyed--it was a way of looking at the whole world."
* * * * * Leo Smith's journey to this point merits our consideration. A native of the rich Delta bottomland along US-82 between Leland and Indianola, Mississippi, his father, Lucious Smith, was a farm worker and part-time country preacher, and his mother, Sarah Brown Smith, took as her second husband the well-known Delta bluesman, Alex "Little Bill" Wallace. Leo played trumpet with local rhythm & blues bands, including his step-father's outfit, before he migrated to Chicago and quickly hooked up with the AACM, studying under Muhal Richard Abrams as a member of the Experimental Band.
Muhal nurtured Smith's burgeoning interest in creative improvisation and introduced him to the challenge of performing solo. "In the AACM Ensemble, solo concerts were part of the discipline. Everybody had to be able to play a solo concert. What we learned is that solo playing is more than playing alone--'s a way of making a total music."
The AACM curriculum also focused closely on the roots and historical development of African-American creative music, following the culture of jazz from its African origins through the long years of slavery in America and the post-Emancipation flowering of the several idioms of African-American vernacular music.
Careful attention was paid to the stages of jazz composition and improvisation which brought the music "From Ancient to the Future," and the music was examined as a function of the everyday lives of the people who created it--that is, as a product of the social forces pressing on the culture at any given moment of creation.
"The idea of jazz which is so important," Leo points out, "is that it is a direct reflection of the democratic principles. Jazz is the spirit of freedom, and the democratic process is tied up in this spirit of freedom. The jazz ensemble is the very model of democracy. In jazz the individual is given a part in the creative process, as a player-composer-innovator. In a jazz ensemble, every member is an equal participant like in an African drum circle."
Another key tenet of the AACM philosophy centered on the value to the creative musician of mastering not only one's chosen instrument but the entire family of related instruments, as well as an entire array of percussive and colorative devices, in order to gain access to the fullest possible range of sound and rhythmic expression.
The principles of democracy were applied here too, as the AACM strove to break down the hierarchical idea that one instrument or approach is superior to another. As Leo puts it, "I see myself as a multi-instrumentalist who regards all instruments as being equal."
* * * * *
The recording under hand everywhere reveals Leo's utter mastery of the AACM teachings learned 25 years ago in Chicago. Not only has he maintained his organizational affiliation with the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians over the years, but he has steadily developed his own musical approach along the lines drawn by Muhal Richard Abrams for the Experimental Orchestra. Now, half a life farther down the line, Smith has pulled it all together into a coherent musical statement which manages both to encompass and to synthesize his several spiritual, political, cultural and musical concerns.
"With this record," Leo says, "I have gone back and reclaimed the kulture of jazz. I tried to hook up the whole history of jazz." At the same time he succeeds in relating the Kulture of Jazz to his own deeply held religious beliefs as a devout Rastafarian, shaping his music as so many Rastas do into a form of evangelism and prayer but yet a form uniquely his own.
"I would define the music as Jah Music," he says, "and not reggae--cause it's a jazzman rhythm expressing the wisdom of Jah through music. It deals with the same issues as Rasta but in the kulture of jazz."
True enough, Kulture Jazz begins with "Don't You Remember?", a powerful piece for voice and mbira which sets the tone and prepares the ground for the suite of songs and improvisations that follows:
DON'T YOU REMEMBER?
Some say to I
that we were
never free
Woaaah-aaah-woaaah-oooh
I remember a time
so long long ago
where the people
of the world
lived free and
peacefully
Oh don't you remember?
Don't you remember those ancient times?
And as we live and work on the land
golden ray
of the sun
giving life force
Oh don't you remember?
Don't you remember those ancient times?
Sweet light
true light
ay JAH
Rastafari
Almighty love
Now when a brow
is so troubled, weary
I see nations
big and small
holding food as a weapon
But now lovers
lovers
lovers of the world
are making
a great stand
for human rights
Just as surely
as day follows night
this almighty world
shall know
Victory
I say
this almighty force
of love
shall know Victory
Spoken: Truth pressed to the earth
shall rise again
(c) 1992 Wadada Leo Smith
* * * * *
"Kulture of Jazz" is a trumpet statement with gong and cymbal interpolations which fully captures the feeling of jazz without direct reference to historical jazz forms and is thus emblematic of the entire album under hand. Here and throughout this work Leo makes perfect sense of his insistence that this is music, however diverse, made by a jazzman, a bluesman, a Black man who is a product of late 20th-century African-American culture presently engaged in shaping an image in sound which embodies the charge of the moment of its issue, in the same measure as the great jazz artists of every stage of the music's development have well established.
Leo goes on to pay homage to several of the central figures in the kulture of jazz Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday ("For me, Billie Holiday is one of the most important master improvisors in history"), John Coltrane, Albert Ayler, the Delta bluesman by drawing shapely musical portraits of his profound feelings of love and appreciation for the music they have left for us.
But he prefaces these specific praise songs with three evocative compositions that speak to the essential components of the greater reality: "Song of Humanity (Kanto Pri Homaro)", a piece for muted trumpet dedicated to the unity of all humankind; "Fire-sticks, Chrysanthemums and Moonlight, a paean to the natural world performed on hand-made bamboo flute and small percussions; and "Seven Rings of Light in the Hola Trinity", a spirited praise song to Haile Selassie tendered by koto and voice.
"Louis Armstrong Counter-Pointing" begins the inner suite of intensely personal tributes to African-American musical ancestors with a composition for three trumpets which clearly suggests the intensity and magnitude of Armstrong's contributions to the kulture of jazz he did the work of three men, Leo seems to imply here, each operating at the highest level of human achievement.
"Albert Ayler in a Spiritual Light" limns the soulful saxophonist and visionary with gentle sketches for trumpet and harmonica, clearly and succinctly drawn as always in Leo's improvisations. "The Kemet Omega Reigns (For Billie Holiday)" is a work for three flugelhorns which celebrates the Lady whom Leo considers the beginning and end of jazz vocalization, a wonder unto herself with a most complex personality and the capacity to give it full expression. And "Love Supreme (For John Coltrane)" sings the praises of the great master with a song for voice, muted trumpet, and mbira set in one of Trane's most characteristic rhythms.
Smith delves deeper into his own personal sources with the next two compositions. "Mississippi Delta Sunrise," a solo piece for koto, is imbued with the colors and scents of the countryside where Leo grew up and the sounds and emotions expressed by the blues players native to the region. "Mother: Sarah Brown-Smith-Wallace (1920-92)" invokes through a gorgeous muted trumpet interlude the spirit of the artist's beloved Muh-Dear, a strong, quietly devout daughter of the Delta who passed away just last year.
Kulture Jazz concludes with The Healer's Voyage on the Sacred River", a prayer in brass dedicated to Ayl Kwel Armah, author of The Healers, The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, Why Are We So Blessed?, and 2000 Seasons, among other well-read works; and the final selection, an exuberant song for voice, calabash, and trumpet titled "Uprising" that closes the sacred circle drawn by these compositions with a triumphant echo of the great victory predicted in the opening number, "Don't You Remember?":
Tell your children
there's a great uprising coming
some day,
some day.
"You see, all humankind is divine," Leo winds up our conversation. "This message is what is expressed in song and instrumental music. When looking at jazz, those who are really able to be enlightened by it are the ones who can have a spiritual experience with jazz- which demonstrates the purity of the music."
Believe me, dear friends, it doesn't get any purer than this. br>
--New Orleans,
March 1993
(C) 1993, 2006 John Sinclair. All Rights Reserved.
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