Elevating the Underground: The ’70s NYC Loft Jazz Scene 

Source: Bandcamp Daily.

“You always have so-called ‘mainstream’ stuff happening,” says Wadada Leo Smith pragmatically. “That’s just the bandwidth of the commercial zone. You have it in every type of music.” Then the sagacious, 81-year-old trumpet innovator slows his speech for emphasis, adding dramatic punctuation with increasing pauses as his concepts expand. “Because those things are there—and you’re not part of them—then you have to build your own reality. And that reality is not a protest against—but it is something for—in this case, for ourselves.”