Four Score: A Conversation with Wadada Leo Smith on Turning 80 (Part One)

Many people, as they get older, tend to slow down and reduce their workload. Some even step aside and retire entirely. Wadada Leo Smith takes the opposite approach. Over the past year, Smith has been perhaps more productive than ever. 2021 has found him behind a 3 CD solo trumpet box set (Trumpet (TUM, 2021)), a series of duets and trio with Bill Laswell and the late Milford Graves (Sacred Ceremonies (TUM, 2021)), a trio with Mike Reed and Douglas R. Ewart (Sunbeams of Shimmering Light (Astral Spirits, 2021)), a trio with Jack DeJohnette and Vijay Iyer (A Love Sonnet for Billie Holiday (TUM, 2021)), and a second multi-disc outing of his Great Lakes Quartet featuring Henry Threadgill, DeJohnette, and John Lindberg (The Chicago Symphonies (TUM, 2021)). It seems he will be just as prolific in 2022, including releasing an album featuring compositions he has been working on for almost sixty years. In the interim, he will be having a special concert performance – available on his website and Youtube – on his 80th Birthday, December 18th. 

Across Smith’s life, we find an artist of unbridled creativity flourishing in a less than nourishing environment, beginning with his growing up as a Black man in segregation-era Mississippi. Now an elder, he still expresses concerns about discrimination and racial justice. But throughout his ingenuity has shone through his surroundings. Over the years, he has become one of the most acclaimed creative artists of his time. The trumpeter’s music, which he dubs “creative music,” partly to avoid preexisting labels, lives up to its name. Part of this comes from the fact that though a historian, he is always looking forward. And he exhibits a fearlessness in being himself. He seems to be eternally searching for new ways to look at things and to express his craft. This includes the use, since the late 1960s, of his own compositional language for many of his pieces. Manifested as colorful paintings, Ankhrasmation scores are utterly unique. The scores themselves have even been showcased at various museums to much acclaim. His music has also earned him the honor of a 2013 finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Music for his Ten Freedom Summers (Cuneiform, 2012), a work covering pivotal moments in, and figures from, the Civil Rights Movement between 1954 and 1964. He has also won a 2016 Doris Duke Artist Award and an honorary doctorate from CalArts. We are honored to sit down with Smith to discuss various points across his career thus far and, equally as importantly, what he has planned for the future. 

PostGenre: What does it mean to you to be turning 80? 

Wadada Leo Smith: Truthfully, it means I’m alive. The rest of it is not worth talking about much. I still have to deal with all the other things you encounter when you are a human being born into a society that overwhelmingly does not value Black lives. You see so many problems from the early stages of your life onward. I’m shocked to be 80 years old and living in a society that is still dealing with these problems. Probably the most beautiful thing here is to still be alive.  

PG: How do feel your music has changed over the decades? 

WLS: Well, I’ve grown up. I’ve learned that any sound can be matched with any other sound. I’ve learned that musicians must carefully pick who to work with for the right project come to fruition. I’ve learned that there’s no friendship on stage. Making art has nothing to do with friends or even people. It is all from a higher force and brought down to us.  

PG: What can you share about the 80^th Birthday concert you have coming up? 

WLS: It is a short video film. It will have Pheeroan akLaff on three pieces, my grandson Lamar Smith on guitar, and Erika Dohi on piano. We are also looking at Sylvie Courvoisier to do a pre-recorded short piece to mix into what we are doing. It will be about thirty minutes of music then we will show a short film that was made about thirty years ago.  

PG: You are recording it at Firehouse 12? 

WLS: Yes, it will be video recorded from there. 

PG: You have lived in New Haven, Connecticut for several years. Although not always discussed as much as some larger cities, New Haven has a strong creative music scene, including the existence of places like Firehouse 12. Where do you think that creative music culture comes from? Charles Ives lived in the city for some time, did any of it come from him? 

WLS: Well, Charles Ives was here as a student but spent most of his creative life in New York City, where he was also working as an insurance agent. I would say that the creative music scene here began with Marion Brown and myself in the early 1970s. We started putting things together to create a context in which creative music was the effort and the total aim of presentation. Several creative musicians also formed an organization called the Creative Musicians Improvisers Forum, which consisted of young players here in Connecticut like Bobby Naughton, Anthony Davis, Pheeroan akLaff, and Gerry Hemingway. I’m sure some of the strength of the creative music scene here comes out of that as well. And there are also the people who migrate here, bringing their own musical ideas.   

PG: To focus on your recordings, you put out several projects in 2021 and have many more coming up in 2022, including the string quartets, Cosmic Music, Emerald Duets, and a cantata for First Responders. What can you share about these forthcoming projects? 

WLS: Well, all of the releases are important to me but the one that most stands out in my mind is the string quartets. I have been developing music for string quartets since, probably, 1965. These string quartet pieces are something I’ve been working on for almost fifty-seven years now. The release is of twelve of them across seven CDs. It is not a recording of all of my string quartets. As of now, I have composed fifteen string quartet pieces. Numbers 13, 14, and 15 will not be part of the album; those three haven’t even been played yet. But I consider the other twelve coming out to be a landmark achievement for me. They show fifty some-odd years of music activity, which I think is rare and unique in music. 

PG: It sounds like an even bigger project than Ten Freedom Summers.  

WLS: Well, it’s a longer project for sure. Ten Freedom Summers, at the recording stage, ended up being 6 ½ hours of music. In the later years, it became seven hours of music played over three days.  

PG: Since we are on the topic of your prior recordings, is there one specifically that you are most proud of? 

WLS: I think I have a hundred that I’m proud of. [laughing]. 

PG: Fair enough. How about this: is there one that you feel was not fully appreciated or understood by most people who listened to it? 

WLS: I think people understand exactly what they want to understand. I don’t like to think in terms of the idea that someone may not understand what you are doing in your music. If someone says they don’t understand your music, it really means they don’t like what you are doing and just want to act like they don’t understand it.  

And that’s perfectly alright because as Baby Dodds said, “creative music can be enjoyed by anybody, but it’s not for everybody.” So, it finds its own level of audience. It grows and keeps growing. And if you can stay alive, praise be to the Almighty, then chances are your art is going to find its way. One day you wake up and people will say, “wow, how did he get here?” And the artist got there because he was already there, the audience just didn’t always see he was there.  

PG: A significant part of your music also lies in Ankhrasmation. To ask you about Ankhrasmation for a minute…  

WLS: That’s a hard one. I’ll do my best, but that is a hard one because, to understand Ankhrasmation, you have to get outside of the normal language people use to make music. Ankhrasmation is a symbolic language. One score or one panel – which is one page of the score – has color and images on it. One has to construct and reference those shapes and colors. And it is all done through science, biology, and mathematics. By science, I mean that when you reference a color, the only way to identify a specific color is by examining how light appears to us. The way we refer to color is through the light cycle since that is the range which we can see. There are areas in the light cycle – like the ultraviolet zone – that we can’t even see. The same goes for sound. We have a small window of sound that we can articulate. But Ankhrasmation language takes you beyond those short frame limitations in both style and color.  

PG: Is the performance of an Ankhrasmation piece dependent on how the artist individually interprets the painting? 

WLS: No, they don’t interpret the painting. You see, that is exactly what I am saying. If they are just interpreting it, it is just a graphic score. Ankhrasmation is more than just a graphic score. It is a language and also a symbol. It is symbolic meaning that you don’t interpret it but actually reference those colors and shapes. And when you do that, you have the greatest possibility of coming up with something authentic and real. But none of that makes sense if it is not through inspiration.  

PG: How did you come up with Ankhrasmation? 

WLS: It was through dreaming and reflection. It started in the 1960s. I went to Chicago in 1967 and, I believe this information I am telling you about now, I dreamed of and thought of somewhere between 1963 and 1965.  

PG: Since we are talking about the past, history has often played a significant part in your works, whether referencing an important historical figure or event. How do you think, going forward, the events of 2020 and 2021 will be reflected in your music? 

WLS: Well, my output during the pandemic has essentially tripled. For example, I’ve made at least twenty-five Ankhrasmation scores during the pandemic, some as large as 47” by 37.” I have also started a series based on sound as a particle and those scores are 50” by 40” or so. I also did some as small as 8” by 12”. I go by whatever the inspiration is telling me is needed to make the score. The Ankhrasmation scores alone are a tremendous amount that could fit in any library or museum exhibit.  

I also did three suites. I did a new one called “Central Park.” Another, “Mercy” is a forty-five- or fifty-five-minute cantata for five instruments plus a vocalist. The instrumental part is done by trumpet, drums, and two pianos. And I also wrote string quartets number 13, 14, and 15 during the pandemic.  

PG: You are incredibly prolific and it seems part of your process is to put your musical ideas in a series of notebooks. What distinguishes the pieces in the books that make it to the recording stage from those that do not? 

WLS: Well, if I need a piece and I am in the studio, I can pull the book up and find the piece and either quickly write it up or dictate it to people. Keeping a notebook is like a musical diary where you record moments of inspiration. Those moments of inspiration are available at your disposal if you need them at any time.  

PG: And as far as some of those ideas, it is clear from the things your works reference that you are very well-read. How do you get the idea of turning something you have read into music, and what exactly drives you in that creative process? 

WLS: There is a three-step process- reflection, inspiration, and research. Reflection is the biggest key. Reflection comes first. Reflection either triggers you to be inspired or starts a discussion about something. And once you are inspired, the next step is research. The research part is very mechanical and involves reading and searching for information.  

PG: Somewhat related, to go with your two most recent albums, A Love Sonnet for Billie Holiday of course references the singer and, to some degree, The Chicago Symphonies build off of Don Cherry’s Symphony for Improvisers (Blue Note, 1966). It seems that in your music you are, to some degree, building off of the contributions of those who came before and yet the results sound different. What are your thoughts on the interplay between tradition and new creation? 

WLS: Well, as far as The Chicago Symphonies, Don Cherry’s Symphony for Improvisers brings up the idea of what it means for something to be a symphony. A symphony just means sound coloring another sound. Don Cherry had a bright idea, and the inspiration, to expose the true meaning of a symphony by making it for a quintet. For me, that was an inspiration to understand the clarity of the word “symphony” and its basic meaning so I decided to do something similar for a quartet without a piano. If you look at any symphony – whether it be by Charles Ives, Stravinsky, Debussy, or any orchestra composer really – there is never more than three or four ideas going on at any time. So, my idea was to take those four parts and give them to each instrument in a quartet.  

PG: Since you mentioned Stravinsky, Ives, and Debussy, do you see any disconnect between “classical music” and creative music to which some may append the label “jazz”? Are they just different ways of looking at the same thing? 

WLS: Well, it’s all music. That’s the big thing. In Europe, they began to commercialize music when they started printing scores, around the time of the rise of the printing press. And, of course, that then extended to America. And since then, people have continued to commercialize music. And this has caused, especially in America, many people in the industry to see music not as music but rather as a commodity. But music is a commodity only if the audience recognizes the work as a commodity. Campbell soup makes hundreds of millions of cans of soup. That is a commodity. But music? Music should never be marketed as a commodity, but it has been. People follow that game, but you don’t have to if you don’t believe it. If you believe that your work of art is not a commodity, even if it’s being sold as a commodity, it is not a commodity. 

Our Conversation with Wadada Leo Smith continues here.

Wadada’s 80th Birthday Celebration will take place on December 18, 2021, and be available on his website and on Youtube. It will feature Smith in a duet with Erika Dohi on piano/electronics and an ensemble with Smith joined by Pheeroan AkLaff on drums, Erika Dohi on piano, and Lamar Smith guitar.

The following albums are now available from TUM Records’ website: solo trumpet set, Trumpet; a series of duets and trio with Bill Laswell and the late Milford Graves, Sacred Ceremonies; trio with Jack DeJohnette and Vijay Iyer, A Love Sonnet for Billie Holiday; and multi-disc recording of Smith’s Great Lakes Quartet featuring Henry Threadgill, DeJohnette, and John Lindberg, The Chicago Symphonies.

Sunbeams of Shimmering Light, a trio with Mike Reed and Douglas R. Ewart, can be purchased from Astral Spirits’ Bandcamp page.