Wadada Leo Smith with Golden Quartet and Southwest Chamber Music in LA

From Jazztimes and other sources:

Trumpeter/Composer Wadada Leo Smith Presents World Premiere of Civil Rights Opus “Ten Freedom Summers” with Golden Quartet and Southwest Chamber Music

Multi-Media Event October 28 – 30 at the
REDCAT Theater in the Walt Disney Concert Hall Complex, Los Angeles
The musicians will record the project in the days after the premiere for release on Cuneiform in the spring of 2012.

“Ten Freedom Summers” is a collaboration between Smith’s celebrated Golden Quartet featuring pianist/composer Anthony Davis, bassist John Lindberg and drummer Susie Ibarra, and the acclaimed Southwest Chamber Music ensemble conducted by Grammy Award-winner Jeff von der Schmidt. The musicians will record the project in the days after the premiere for release on Cuneiform in the spring of 2012. In designing the sprawling multi-movement work, Smith focused on the formative decade framed by the landmark 1954 Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education that overturned the notorious Plessy v. Ferguson decision ratifying Jim Crow segregation, and the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed many forms of racial discrimination.

More than a three-night musical premiere, “Ten Freedom Summers” is a multimedia project that incorporates archival news footage and evocative but abstract cinematic imagery edited with a self-consciously musical sensibility. The production was inspired conceptually by August Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 10-play Pittsburgh Cycle, in which each play chronicles a decade of African-American life in the 20th century.

The REDCAT premiere is the culmination of more than three decades of intermittent work, study and contemplation. Smith has divided the 18 movements into three thematic collections, “Defining Moments in America,” “What is Democracy?” and “Ten Freedom Summers.” With movements dedicated to the indomitable Mississippi Freedom Democracy Party leader Fannie Lou Hamer, the brutally slain teenager Emmett Till, and Montgomery bus boycott catalyst Rosa Parks, the first collection could just as easily be called “Heroes and Martyrs” as “Defining Moments.”

Born and raised in Leland, Mississippi, Wadada Leo Smith got his start playing trumpet in R&B bands, and by the mid 1960s had gravitated to Chicago’s burgeoning avant-garde jazz community. An early member of the seminal AACM collective, he collaborated with a dazzling cast of fellow visionaries, including Leroy Jenkins, Anthony Braxton, Henry Threadgill, Anthony Davis and Oliver Lake. On faculty at Cal Arts since 1993, he has influenced several generations of improvisers and composers.

Recording prolifically over the past two decades, Smith released an acclaimed series of albums with guitarist Henry Kaiser inspired by the early 1970s fusion of Miles Davis. Since he founded the Golden Quartet with Jack DeJohnette, Anthony Davis, and Malachi Favors the group has undergone several incarnations, featuring prodigious young players such as pianists Vijay Iyer and Angelica Sanchez. His latest release is a captivating, avant funk double album by his Organic orchestra, “Heart’s Reflections” (Cuneiform Records).

While Smith is known for his beautifully rendered graphic scores, he composed “Ten Freedom Summers” using traditional notation. Though true to his status as one of American music’s most inventive composers, Smith’s notation requires unusual discipline and improvisational skills. “Time is determined when you play the piece,” Smith says. “It liberates the player from having to count things. Everybody has the entire score, their parts and everybody else’s. It is traditional notation with five lines to a staff, but it’s a far cry from someone conducting a downbeat and moving across the score. It’s a lot of responsibility, but that’s what makes the world go round.”

TEN FREEDOM SUMMERS CONCERT INFORMATION:

Friday, October 28, 2011 Ten Freedom Summers, Part One 8:30 p.m.
Saturday, October 29, 2011 Ten Freedom Summers, Part Two 8:30 p.m.
Sunday, October 30, 2011 Ten Freedom Summers, Part Three 7 p.m.

Tickets: $38 each evening general admission; $28 each evening for students/CalArts Faculty/Staff, http://www.redcat.org/event/ten-freedom-summers (213) 237-2800.

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