Adam Matlock Photos
Smith.
When trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith presented the first CREATE Festival at Firehouse 12 on Crown Street in 2017, the endeavor served to introduce, or reintroduce, people to Smith’s body of work as a Pulitzer Prize-winning composer.
From the atmosphere in the room on Sunday, this year’s CREATE Festival — the third — was as much about the celebration of a musical family, old and new.
The evening began with a short performance from Smith’s granddaughter, Jaya Smith-Tavaris, who was all smiles as she took her seat in front of the piano. Leading off with an energetic version of “When The Saints Go Marchin’ In,” Smith-Tavaris took a bow and then played “Blues Melody,” an original composition.
The atmosphere in the room was relaxed and welcoming enough that a young artist-in-training could play fearlessly, and that carried over during the breaks between sets, during which the crew at Firehouse 12 set microphones and music stands, and performers chatted with audience members prior to the set’s beginning.
The next piece was Smith’s “Sweet Bay Magnolia with Berry Clusters,” performed by Ashley Walters on cello with acclaimed dancer Oguri performing Butoh, a form of Japanese dance. The piece began with strong, stable tones on the cello as Oguri made a slow circle through the aisles of the room. The discipline of Butoh allowed for some extremely dynamic contrasts against the cello. At one point, Oguri, dressed in off-white, seemed to be pulling something off of (or out of) his head, while Walters traveled into a higher range, letting loose an array of skittering notes. Rooted in the actual stage area, Walters craned her neck at times to maintain eye contact with the dancer as he traveled the room, but the conversation between instrument and body was fluid.
Butoh is a style and philosophy of movement that is difficult to encapsulate (see video). Contortion was an especially marked feature of Oguri’s performance, and there was a childlike naïveté in how the artist occupied the space. But the choice of stillness made as profound an impact as the choice of movement — whether frozen in a sculptural position, or standing at rest.
This dynamic was fully exploited in the next piece, “Min,” written for (and performed by) Min Xiao-Fen, alongside Oguri and Smith on trumpet. Playing the pipa, a Chinese lute with a long sustain, Xiao-Fen led the piece as a slow, spacious conversation — echoed by the extreme dynamics of Oguri’s dance, which began from a seated position on the floor of the house. Smith’s trumpet and Xiao-Fen’s pipa and voice were amplified, allowing each player to communicate with single notes and quiet gestures as Oguri, now in a black top, made a path through the room. At one point, the dancer added his voice to the sound.
“We don’t usually use the voice in Butoh,” he said afterward, “but in this moment it was the right choice.”
Afterward, Xiao-Fen spoke fondly of her collaboration with Smith, which dates back to 1996, when he first composed “Lake Biwa: A Full Moon Purewater Gold” for her.
“I had never improvised before meeting Wadada,” she said. “I remember feeling like time stopped when he first called on me to take a solo.”
But the experience was formative for her, and her confident, spacious improvisations last night demonstrated a joy in the uncertainty — such as when she wrestled with the tuning pegs of her instrument, enjoying the creaking sound of the friction as much as the detuned effect of the slackened strings.
The evening concluded with a lengthy set from the Golden Quintet, one of Smith’s longest-running active ensembles. Since its inception as a quartet in 2000, this group has had a rotating cast of excellent pianists, bassists, and percussionists, all of whom are composers of their own work. With the addition of Ashley Walters’s cello, the group becomes more of a chamber orchestra than a jazz combo.
As the quintet began the first notes of “JFK in Dallas: Parkland: 11.22.1963,” a single piano note and cymbal stroke rang out in unison, and the following melody seemed fragmented between the voices of the piano, bass and, cello. The economy of the writing in this opening section gave each note extra weight, and the music left ample space for the long decay of the piano.
“JFK” established itself with an elegiac tone — moments of uncertainty and paranoia, but overwhelmingly marked by lush extended tonality. Smith took his time before joining the music, and the whole while kept his eye on the group, cuing other players in and out. There was a cyclic nature to the music, even during lengthy solo and duo passages that paired piano and cello with percussion. Of special note was Pheeroan AkLaff’s melodic cymbal work before the reprise of the theme.
Speaking about the piece, Smith mentioned that he thought of JFK’s assassination as the first in a series of political/cultural assassinations in the 1960s that began “the destruction of intellectual power as a force for radical change,” speaking as much to Kennedy’s status as a cultural figure as to his presidency. The next piece, dedicated to musician and activist Miriam Makeba, demonstrated a similar thoughtfulness about a significant cultural figure, and a willingness to have a musical conversation about her legacy.
The piece opened with stately cymbal work from AkLaff, before being joined by bassist John Lindberg, who brought spare, probing notes amid the glacial decay of the cymbals. The melody began with an aching cry from Smith, in unison with Walters’s cello and clear notes from pianist Erika Dohi, the quintet’s newest member. Navigating a thorny introduction, Lindberg settled into a groove which he kept going for the majority of the piece. This fixed ostinato provided the groundwork for a lengthy, expressive solo by Smith, followed by solos from Walters and Dohi, who each seemed to find a different facet of the piece to focus on in their improvisations, rather than each trying to out-do each other in intensity.
While the concert Sunday covered a range of creative and aesthetic realms, the unifying feature was the familial sense infused with every note.
“The closest thing in the world to me is family,” said Smith at the conclusion of the performance. In a night built on years of collaboration and close musical relationships, the sounds were a testament to that closeness.
