Acclaimed composer and trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith stood in front of a whiteboard Sunday afternoon in a room above Firehouse 12’s studio. It was the middle of the first CREATE festival, a weekend-long celebration of Smith’s music that drew musicians to play with him from around the country and kept Firehouse 12’s performance space packed.
“I’m a minimalist,” Smith had said the night before, at the first of two weekend concerts. “I don’t do very much of nothing.”
Except, he said, make a little music. Ponder questions about the universe. Conduct scientific research. Attend imaginary meetings with foreign diplomats. The usual. He said it all with a healthy dose of humor, and the audience laughed. But there was seriousness behind those jokes. And on Sunday afternoon, Smith had only a marker in his hand, and he wasn’t playing; he was drawing shapes on the board, and talking. By doing so, he opened a door into his music, and music making, for everyone.
On Sunday, Smith began with a notation system, a graphic way of conveying music, called Ankrasmation, which he had developed over the decades of his illustrious career so that musicians could create (he avoided the word “improvise”) collectively and make a piece of music that allowed for organization and spontaneity, a sense of direction and a constant openness to new ideas.
“When that structure begins to pop in,” he said, “it’s like a mountain. It’s natural and organic.”
Brian Slattery Photo
But the mountain was one that the musicians built together, each of them bringing their own interpretation of the page in front of them. Some of the information on the page was about form — how much to play, how much space to leave. Some of the information, particularly the color, suggested content.
For instance, red. “When I play red,” Smith said, “I think of it as blood. And what does blood do? It carries things.” That led Smith to the fact that if you stretched out all the blood vessels in a human body, they would circle the world twice. An idea like that could inform his playing as he was creating music.
“You take all of your imagination and your research and use it to make it into space and sound,” Smith said.
But what about playing with other people — listening and reacting to what the other musicians are doing? What about building that mountain?
“Everybody has to listen,” Smith said. “Otherwise you can’t apply what you’re doing.” Tension and perhaps conflict were a natural part of it. “There are always problems when you have more than one head functioning,” Smith said. “You have to solve this equation of how to make art with these problems. You have to make art and keep things moving.”
Which, Smith explained in response to a couple other questions, he sometimes did by intervening, just a little. If he felt that the music wasn’t coming together like it could, he might give direction on the spot. (“I am the score,” he said.) He also might resort to something a little more drastic, to make people be in the moment, and play like themselves. Once, he said, he and his quintet were booked to play a festival in Paris, and the members of his group spent the day listening to everyone else. When it came time for them to perform, Smith said, they didn’t sound like themselves; they sounded like what they’d been listening to.
“They were asleep on stage,” Smith said. So he took their scores away from them, just pulled it off the stands, “and they played marvelous music.”
Building The Mountain
Saturday night at Firehouse 12 began with composer and guitarist Lamar Smith — Wadada Leo Smith’s grandson — playing with fellow guitarists William Brennan and Bentley Lewis as the Lamar Smith Experiment. The piece started off melodic, almost Beatlesque, before it turned into something funkier, as Smith, Brennan, and Lewis swapped melodies, chords, and basslines. The spaces left in the three guitarists’ playing could imply an entire rhythm section. Or just be empty space.
Smith then took the stage to explain that New Dalta Ahkri — Smith on trumpet, Dwight Andrews on saxophones and flutes, and Bobby Naughton on vibraphone — had been playing together for 40 years. They sounded it, as they moved through a spacious piece, “The Earth, a Blue Sanctuary of Translucent Light: Gardens of Fire-Flowers, Underground Seas and Pomegranate Lagoons,” that brought together long chords from Naughton, declarative statements from Smith, and Andrews moving between them like a musical courier. They passed phrases around with glances, raised eyebrows, affirmative nods. A lifted finger as a signal.
Smith explained that at one point in their lives, they played together every week in Andrews’s office. “At that time we also drank a lot of beer,” he said, to laughter. “The rumor got out that all we did was practice and drink beer. But it wasn’t true.”
Smith’s next trio, Mbira, introduced Min Xao Fen on pipa and voice and Pheeroan akLaff on drums and percussion. The piece, “Dark Lady of the Sonnets,” let the voice and pipa stand out, to stunning effect, though closer listening revealed akLaff as a master of texture, coaxing a thousand different notes out of his cymbals and hi-hat. It also revealed Smith as a disciplined bandleader; at one point, Smith reached over and silenced akLaff’s hi-hat with his hand. akLaff gave him a look of mock surprise and switched to toms, creating a deep, subtle rhythm that expanded the music and gave the pipa the sonic space it needed.
Min Xao Fen then remained onstage to be joined by the RedKoral Quartet — Shalini Vijayan and Mona Tian on violins, Lorenz Gamma on viola, and Ashley Walters on cello — who began their part of the program with “The Montgomery Bus Boycott: 381 Days: Fire” (from Rosa Parks Oratorio).” The text, Smith said, was “from a poem Amiri Baraka wrote on the back of a Billie Holliday record.”
“He didn’t see her life as tragic,” Smith said — not with the mark she left on music. To make art like that, Smith said, you have to pay a price. “It’s not free, even if you think it is.” “Montgomery” was an exercise in delicacy and simplicity, as the quartet, playing most of the time in unison, provided harmonies to Min Xao Fen’s ravishing voice.
Anthony Davis joined the quartet on piano for “Ellingtonia / Reminiscing in Tempo (Movement no. 1)” before the RedKoral Quartet then dived into Smith’s “String Quartet no. 9” and “String Quartet no. 10,” which proved the most meditative point in the program, as the strings balanced deft use of harmonics with both the string quartet’s innate warmth and the harshness that each instrument was capable of when the players dug in.
The movements in the ninth string quartet were each dedicated to strong women — Ma Rainey, Marian Anderson, Rosa Parks, and Angela Davis — who had inspired Smith in his own life. “I’m fascinated with the powerful woman,” he said. And, he added, “I’ve got two daughters and three granddaughters. They prepared me for woman power.”
The night finished with the Golden Quintet — Smith on trumpet, Davis on piano, Walters on cello, John Lindberg on bass, and akLaff on drums — tearing into two pieces from a series Smith had written about national parks: “New Orleans: The National Cultural Park USA 1718” and “Yellowstone: The First National Park and the Spirit of America — The Mountains, Super-Volcano Caldera and Its Ecosystem.” Though as Smith said, “for me, the national park is everything on the planet. Every time I open my eyes, I see it.”
As the quintet built these pieces into an enormous thing, bigger than the room, than the building, akLaff could not stop smiling. The music moved from ascending lines like fingers reaching into the clouds to a simple, powerful rhythm that gathered energy as it got slower. At last, at the end, akLaff moved his playing from raucous to spare to absolutely sparse, each hit more meaningful than the last for the space he left between them. His eyes had been turned down, toward his work. Then, at last, he raised his head and looked up, beaming. Like a man on the summit on a mountain.
