(Modern Creative. Improvised Music) [WEB] Wadada Leo Smith - America's National Parks - 2016, FLAC (tracks), lossless

Wadada Leo Smith – trumpet, director of the ensemble
Anthony Davis – piano
Ashley Walters – cello
John Lindberg – bass
Pheeroan akLaff – drums

Wadada Leo Smith: America's National Parks *****
By DAN MCCLENAGHAN
September 27, 2016
Trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith has a feel for the epic in his art, on recordings like: America (Tzadik Records, 2009), a duet set with drummer Jack DeJohnette; "America's Third Century Spiritual Awakening," from his first Golden Quartet (Tzadik Records, 2000) outing; Occupy The World (TUM Records, 2013), with the Finish big band, Tumo; The Great Lakes Suite (TUM Records, 2014), and his massive four disc master work, Ten Freedom Summers (Cuneiform Records, 2012), inspired by America's civil rights movement.
He continues in that vein with America's National Parks, featuring another reconfiguration and expansion of his finest musical vehicle, The Golden Quintet—a small increment expansion of the revolving door ensemble, the Golden Quartet, with the addition of cellist Ashley Walters.
Smith's nod to the National Park system is a loose take on the subject matter. There's Yellowstone and Sequoia/Kings Canyon, and Yosemite, but the interpretation of "National Park," in Smith's mind, is flexible. He includes in the category New Orleans, the Mississippi River and Eileen Jackson Southern, the African-American musicologist and founder of the The Black Perspective in Music.
The music here is measured, often minimalistic, often somber in its reverence. And it is deeply bleak and funereal, interspersed with segments of frantic anguish on the riveting masterpiece-within-the-masterpiece: the half hour long "The Mississippi River: Dark and Deep Dreams Flow the River—a National Memorial Park c. 5000 BC." The Mississippi: a waterway that Smith calls: "a memorial site which was used as a dumping place for black bodies...I use the word "dark" to show these things are buried or hidden, but the body doesn't stay hidden; it floats up." [Smith's quote is taken from the disc's liner notes by Shaun Brady].
This ensemble sound is what every bandleader aspires to but rarely achieves. Anthony Davis— better known as a classical player/composer, and the pianist on the first Golden Quartet (Tzadik Records, 2000) configuration, as well as the band's Year Of The Elephant (Pi Recordings, 2002)—injects his off-center, idiosyncratic elegance to the sound. John Lindberg, Smith's bassist of choice for The Year Of the Elephant (Pi Recording, 2012) and the trumpeter's duet partner on Celestial Weather (TUM Records, 2015), provides deep rhythmic grooves and dark backdrops. Drummer Pheeroan AkLaff is a flexible groove master/colorist, textural-ist of the highest order; and Ashley Walters' cello paints the rich, beautiful hues that subtly enhance the entire proceedings—the most auspicious addition to a jazz ensemble since Chico Hamilton brought the instrument into his chamber groups in the late 1950s.
And then there's Wadada Leo Smith: his trumpet, open horn, sounds like the voice of a celestial prophet, singing a message to the seeker on the mountain-top. Muted, he's a benevolent spirit of an earthbound netherworld, speaking esoteric-but-undeniable truths. Wrap these sounds together inside the vision of Wadada Leo Smith and you have a seductive and captivating and transcendent ninety minutes of music.
Disc 1's opener on this two CD set, "New Orleans: The National Culture Park USA 1718," throbs to life on a resonant seven note bass riff from John Lindberg. The ensemble sound paints a picture under dark, roiling clouds. Smith's brush doesn't render the Big Easy a celebratory, bon ton roulet type of place. Perhaps he envisions the floating bodies in the Mississippi drifting down to the Crescent City, silent witnesses to America's original sin, on this starkly beautiful twenty-one minute dirge.
Wadada Leo Smith, in the middle of his seventh decade now, has created a body or work that qualifies him as one of America's artistic geniuses, in a league with Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Herman Melville, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Miles Davis. A visionary. America's National Parks, along with virtually every recording he has released in the new millennium, confirms it.
Track Listing: CD 1: New Orleans: The National Culture Park USA 1718; Eileen Jackson Southern, 1920-2002: A Literary National Park; Yellowstone: The First National Park And The Spirit Of America--The Mountains, Super-Volcano Caldera And Its Ecosystem 1872. CD2: The Mississippi River: Dark and Deep Dreams Flow the river--A National Memorial Park c. 5000 BC; Sequoia/King's Canyon National Parks: The Giant Forest, Great Canyon, Cliff, Peaks, Waterfalls and Cave System 1890; Yosemite: The Glaciers, The Falls, The Wells And The Valley of Goodwill 1890.
Personnel: Wadada Leo Smith: trumpet, director Of The Ensemble; Anthony Davis: piano; Ashley Walters: cello; John Lindberg: bass; Pheeroan akLaff: drums; Jesse Gilbert: video artist.
Year Released: 2016 | Record Label: Cuneiform Records | Style: Modern Jazz

Wadada Leo Smith
America's National Parks
CUNEIFORM • 2016
7.9
by Seth Colter Walls
JAZZ
OCTOBER 17 2016
Trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith's latest is an expansive and politically charged suite that pays tribute to official national parks as well as cultural zones not yet recognized by government decree.
Though trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith is a leading maestro of abstraction, he loves a straightforward concept as much as anyone else. Over the last decade, he’s composed The Great Lakes Suites, as well as the expansive Civil Rights-themed project Ten Freedom Summers (which drew from avant-jazz and modern-classical languages). For his 2016 album with pianist Vijay Iyer, Smith wrote a tribute to the African American contralto Marian Anderson.
Musical dedications are now as much a part of Smith’s process as the experimental nature of his fiery improvisations. But these historical shout-outs are not just creative prompts that he uses to get his writing hand going. Smith’s monuments often develop into sly editorials. When the composer extends his Civil Rights-era meditation to include 21st-century events, it’s his way of diagnosing the lingering nature of vintage prejudices.
America’s National Parks clearly fits in among these trends in Smith’s latter-day output. The double-album contains the veteran jazz quartet that helped power Summers, and adds in the impressive cello work of Ashley Walters. While the ensemble’s size is smaller than that of the group that recorded Summers, this lineup has the same jazz-plus-classical range of instrumental attack. And Smith’s commentary resides in his choices of grounds to celebrate. These include national parks already in operation—like Yellowstone—but also hallowed cultural zones not yet recognized by government decree.
The title of the opening movement, “New Orleans: The National Culture Park USA 1718,” references the pre-American nature of the city’s founding by the French Mississippi Company. Yet the loping quality of the opening groove shows that Smith is commending this location as a potential national park on the basis of its relationship to jazz. The tempo is slow, and sometimes makes way for beat-free stretches of sound. But overall, it still has a finger-snapping, swinging feel—thanks to the way bassist John Lindberg and drummer Pheeroan akLaff emphasize the underlying pulse.
At first, the mood occupies a middle ground between celebration and solemn observation—as Smith’s trumpet switches from bright lines of heraldry to subtler harmonizing with Walters’ bowed cello lines. Then, a few minutes in, a faster beat arrives. Smith responds with a muted-trumpet solo full of pristine, bluesy poise. Eventually, the pianist (and excellent composer) Anthony Davis gets a lengthy feature that closes with an impressionistic, dreamy cadenza. At this juncture, the opening track is barely half over—and it’s already given listeners a trio of distinct, memorable worlds.
As with other ambitious projects from Smith, America’s National Parks wants your focused attention, and your time. But the rewards it offers can make those substantial requests feel justified. The most dramatic mix of styles comes during the half-hour piece “The Mississippi River: Dark and Deep Dreams Flow the River—a National Memorial Park c. 5000 BC.” Grim piano chords and ominously bowed strings suggest a potential for violence, before the album’s most powerful stretches of free-improv bashing make good on the threat. (Smith describes this “park” as “a memorial site which was used as a dumping place for black bodies by hostile forces in Mississippi.”)
Elsewhere, the stark, sometimes violent majesty of the natural world is conjured by imposing blocks of atonal modernism, during “Sequoia/Kings Canyon National Parks: The Giant Forest, Great Canyon, Cliffs, Peaks, Waterfalls and Cave Systems 1890.” And a tender beauty is fostered in the chamber music writing of Smith’s most abstract, conceptual idea in this series: “Eileen Jackson Southern, 1920-2002: A Literary National Park.” (Southern was the Harvard musicologist who wrote The Music of Black Americans, among other important works.)
The album isn’t quite the overwhelming achievement that Ten Freedom Summers was, though the refined ensemble playing of Smith’s newly convened “Golden Quintet” is consistently ravishing. And the duration of the set gradually proposes a unique charm. Once you travel all the way to a monument, you don’t take a quick look and then leave. In similar fashion, these extended tributes create a persuasive argument regarding the attention still due to a nation’s history, and its cultural variety.