Jazz breaking news: Wadada Leo Smith radiant with Ten Freedom Summers at Café Oto
Wednesday, November 27, 2013
Such has been the recent growth of the EFG London Jazz Festival that major gig clashes are unavoidable.
Yet this three-night residency by Wadada Leo Smith drew a more or less full house for each session. This is a sign of the pulling power of the 71 year-old trumpeter, who has been a frequent visitor to Oto, one of the capital’s key programmers of creative music, these past few years. But one might also attribute the healthy turnouts to the richness and ambition of Ten Freedom Summers, an epic meditation on the sacrifices made during the Civil rights movement that unites the trumpeter’s Golden Quartet with London’s Ligeti String Quartet. Cast against the backdrop of Jesse Gilbert’s skillfully assembled montages of Martin, Malcolm, lesser-known ‘freedom riders’ and action shots of the players on stage, Smith’s music, which is symphonic and metamorphic, had the emotional charge and structural invention to serve this weighty subject matter.
At one point he joked to the audience that he couldn't count, but as a musician ‘he had to feel’, and that nailed a compelling aspect of the arrangements: a near-constant flux. Drummer Anthony Brown seemed to slightly struggle with the metric dot dash at times – Smith turned to cue him more than anybody else- and the transitions between movements were unnervingly stark on occasion. Yet these jolts distilled the inherent drama of a piece that wheeled constantly between dream state modal passages and bursts of whirling ensemble playing marshalled by Smith’s blustery horn, Anthony Davis’ dynamic piano and John Lindberg’s sturdy double bass, the tonal richness of which was enhanced by flurries of open notes and flamenco strumming. As for the strings, they were not there simply to produce soft ‘pads’ or effete legatos for the rhythm section, but matched it in terms of collective and individual attack, leaping violently between registers to unleash a range of startling sounds that strongly suggested both the human and machine-generated yelps that pepper Rip, Rig & Panic.
Unlike the late Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Smith, although heavily associated with Chicago, has roots in Leland, Mississippi, and if there was one key element that marked the residency it was the blues, not necessarily as a set of chord changes, but as the same yearning, brooding weariness, the intensely human cry that defines Coltrane’s Alabama. The trumpeter’s quotation of that anthem sealed a certain historic gravitas that was resoundingly in line with a performance that became a London jazz festival highlight. If Wadada Leo Smith still professes to the Rastafarian faith he is dutifully carrying Jah’s heavy load.
– Kevin Le Gendre
– Photo by Roger Thomas