Deerhoof & Wadada Leo Smith Play Sound Of The Street

The full band comes out charging with a monstrous beat, a trumpet line slashing through it all. Then the band takes it all apart. Guitar and trumpet jab at each other, then wail across the room at each other as the band pounds back into the rhythm. It’s ferocious playing for a ferocious time, and it’s the product of an instantly galvanizing pairing of San Francisco-based experimental punks Deerhoof and New Haven-based creative music titan Wadada Leo Smith.

The name of the album, now available on Bandcamp — To Be Surrounded By Beautiful, Curious, Breathing, Laughing Flesh Is Enough — is taken from the Walt Whitman poem ​“I Sing The Body Electric,” which is perhaps a perfect starting point for this album, which channels much of Whitman’s spirit, explosive, exploratory, and deeply humane. The album, as the accompanying notes state, ​“captures the band of Satomi Matsuzaki, Ed Rodriguez, John Dieterich, and Greg Saunier in peak form, and culminates in a thrilling five-song collaborative set with legendary avant-garde jazz trumpeter/composer Wadada Leo Smith as part of New York City’s Winter Jazzfest at Le Poisson Rouge.”

The energy of the performance is palpable, not only because of the cheering crowd in the background, evidently getting what they came for. It’s also in the playing itself, raw, fiery, and at the same time, ridiculously tight. The song ​“Snoopy Waves,” marking Smith’s entrance to the stage, finds the band diving into something like a funk workout that then shambles to a stop. Two songs later, on the song ​“Flower,” trumpet and guitars are playing so well together that it’s occasionally hard to tell which instrument did what.

The first three songs of the Smith set, however, are really just a warmup for ​“Last Fad,” a nearly eight-minute jam in which the group really pulls out the stops. What starts off as a downright danceable number, by the halfway mark, becomes a blistering experiment in texture, and then — perhaps most improbably, a chance for Smith to take a downright lyrical solo that ends with him doing a beautiful duet with Matsuzaki. The contemplative ​“Mirror Monster” ends on a note of real hope. Smith gets the last phrase, and it’s not unreasonable to interpret the pause between his last note and the crowd’s cheering as stunned silence.

The musicians are donating all the proceeds from the album to Black Lives Matter. In the accompanying notes, Smith lauds the organization for helping ​“bring democratic practices into the American society. Since in today’s world, true democracy is not practiced anywhere on the planet.”

“True democratic principles,” he contiues, ​“demand that all human beings respect the rights of others, and that we develop the capacity to share the wealth, the power and the earth and the sky together, with the condition that we collectively work to build a peaceful world. For all of us!”

Deerhoof drummer Saunier adds his own statement, both looking back on the live music we’ve currently and looking forward to what can be done in the future. ​“Part of what makes touring life so great is how unpredictable it is. All the unexpected encounters, promoters and audiences and performers willing to take a risk,” he writes. ​“That’s what playing together with Wadada was for us. The corporate world seems to want to define ​‘musician’ as ​‘internet content competitor’ but the actual people who make music have to find ways out of that trap. That’s why I’m touched that a master improviser like Wadada would bring up true democracy. To me, democracy and improvisation are linked, and they appear spontaneously at times like these, when strangers come together to take action, and there is no rulebook.” To Be Surrounded By Beautiful, Curious, Breathing, Laughing Flesh Is Enough is a document of those moments of fierce creativity, whether in the club or on the streets.

To Be Surrounded By Beautiful, Curious, Breathing, Laughing Flesh Is Enough is available on Bandcamp.