Wadada Leo Smith
Trumpeter, composer (interview conducted via Zoom)
Mississippi
Mississippi has a history of being one of the most violent territories of the United States of America. Has historically been one of the poorest states and is poor by choice and not by commerce and products like that because it has a very rich fertile land but it’s poor by choice because it keeps the majority of its population poor while it has only a few people amassing wealth. In 1964 people like John Lewis, Fannie Lou Hamer, Julian Bond, Bob Moses, a ton of people organized Voter’s Registration that consisted of young white Americans and young African-Americans going South to register voters and when they went there I’m sure they and their parents had no idea about how violent the state of Mississippi was. Because they were outsiders they could not rent rooms in hotels so they lived with the people that they came to help register to vote. They got beaten with the people that they helped register to vote, they got killed with the people they helped register to vote and this went on for 10 weeks from June,July to August and when the three Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner were killed ,which was a major event at that time, they were all given the opportunity to return home but they decided not to. They stayed there and worked for those 10 weeks. I can tell you that their commitment gave rise to what I believe to be the second major revolution for human rights and justice in America. The first one was the Montgomery bus boycott. What we have today in Mississippi as a result of this is the largest number of elected African-American officials anywhere in the country. More than in NY, more than in California more than in Texas. And what that tells us is that sincere workers engaging in human interaction can change society. It’s never going to change overnight or in a year or two but now we are 56 years from 1964 and guess what? That revolution has occurred. That’s Mississippi.
Chicago
Chicago is one of the great cities that was developed greatly as a consequence of the 1915 Migration. In the following 50 years five million people from the South migrated to the Northeast to the Midwest and to the West. Because of this migration a place like Chicago developed into a place of profound culture. People like Louis Armstrong went there maybe 4 or 5 years later. Earl Hines and people like Joseph Oliver. And not only musicians but also great painters and writers. Richard Wright went there as did Gwendolyn Brooks. This migration out of the South is what planted culture throughout the USA. What happened in the South was that it was the most isolated imprisonment of African-American people and therefore they developed their culture independently in captivity and when that was finally released it enhanced the whole country both culturally, intellectually and scientifically.
AACM
The Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians…It represents probably one of the greatest musical and cultural think tanks in America. Created around the idea of being self sufficient, knowing what your rights were as an artist meaning that you had the responsibility to compose, perform and record your own music and that you could reject recording the Tin Pan Alley and the standards of the music industrial system. That whole notion plus having some idea about our social responsibility. AACM has a history of about 55 or 56 years now in existence and it has made a tremendous impact on music culture around the world. Europe, Asia, Africa, Central and South America. That’s what I think that AACM is about.
Muhal Richard Abrams
Muhal Richard Abrams was one of those early visionary artists who cared a lot about the notion about how to control what you’re doing and how do you get the best value from your creative work. He was a personal friend of mine and we always engaged in deep conversation and deep dreaming together. He’s a very important icon in the history of music.
Describe the difference or the similarity between improvisation and composition?
I have to do it in a much more profound way. I’ll talk about improvisation and I’ll talk about composition and lastly, I’ll talk about Create.
In the early days of history the whole notion of improvisation came through the street theaters and it happened in the Roman Empire and then it lingered but mostly only in theater. A little bit later down the road in the 10th, 11th, 12thcentury people began to think about it purely as theater. Then in the 18thand 19thcentury French and Russian theater writers began to theorize about it in the context of theater. The term used by anthropologists and musicologists and writers was lifted out of the theatrical environment and tagged on and placed into music. I believe that that was a lazy experiment and I believe that they attached it to African-American music more strongly than they did to other kinds of music because every time we resisted the title they stuck it on there anyway. Every single time.
In the academic world where I was teaching - I taught for 37 years in universities and colleges, whenever I would write up my description of what I was doing ….when I saw the catalog as it was being presented to students they would have changed my language inside of it to say jazz like jazz trumpet, jazz history, jazz composition. Then when I would go and look at the classical section it would say composition, it would say trumpet and it would say history. So it was dumped on to this music and then I would remind you that all through the early days of history you never found Joseph Oliver or Louis Armstrong or Bessie Smith or Billie Holiday talking about improvisation. They talked about making music, they talked about playing. They say Johnny Dodd, the drummer, talked about being creative? He talked about that that music was creative music and that’s what he thought it was. So not only is it being misplaced but nearly every composer who has written any kind of text has consistently put down improvisation.
The term itself was not accepted by AACM although all of the musicians associated with AACM used the word improvisation. All of them. The living AACM people all use the word improvisation except me. I don’t use it. I haven’t used it in 5 years.
Composition is anything that has a momentum of musical sounds and rhythms and that it begins and that it ends. That’s a composition. The great German theorist Schenker, had devised the idea of tonal music that all tonal music evolved from a I-V relationship which is the tonic and the dominant relationship. All of the music that has tonality anywhere in the world he proposes follows that principle. But actually, some of them don’t. Like for example the blues. They say the blues is a I-IV- V progression that’s not really quite true because the blues is a 9-tone scale and when the blues becomes a 9-tone scale that means the 1stnote to the 2ndnote to the 3rdnote and on and on, all of those pitches have a whole step and a half step etc. what ends up happening is there is no resolution until you get to the tonic at the top. And so the dominant which was the 5thin a 7-tone scale becomes something else. It becomes a 6thand it doesn’t have the same effect. That’s the blues. And then you’ve got music from Asia and from Africa. They use ideas of resolution but they don’t make their resolution based off of a I-V relationship. So, you see the Western perspective come in and the guy wants to make it so it’s a world perspective. It’s just one phenomenon about people that live in Europe. It’s just one idea about stuff.
Composition is a concoction of sound and rhythm that starts and stops.
It’s not any more or less vibrant than that music that people call “Improvisation”. People have to write to use both forms, composition form and improvisation form and people have a right to be dreamers. like me? And to step outside the bounds of composition and step outside the bounds of improvisation and so what did I do? I decided that music that I would make in the present moment, I define as Create and that is the same kind of creation as the Almighty Creation…. Or it’s the same kind of creation that the scientists make when they speculate about Creation. Though it is in a smaller proportion and has less magnitude but nevertheless it’s like Stevie Wonder says about the Black dot you see A Star heavy as lead and light as a feather. But compacted and explosive and spread out it becomes as powerful or as large as anything else out there. And that’s what’s happening with Create. Why Create because if one truly works with inspiration and not just tradition and not just memory you can step into a creation and make something as authentic, new and unique and those musical phrases, those musical ideas whether they be odd or a sound pops into your head like a new epiphany. Each time it comes complete and each time you deliver it complete as a creation and they have a life of their own they live and live and live. Nobody can kill them. That’ s Create. But on the other side I created Ankhrasmation which is all about symbolic lines for how you make music and art and that Ankhrasmation is exclusive with sound and proportional motion or proportional rhythms. Non metrical, non-tonality…. not based off the I-V relationship or II-V-I relationships. None of that stuff. It’s based of the pure acquisition between one person and their inspiration in a collective ensemble where there are multiple individuals and multiple inspiration.
The notation system that you use is visually very beautiful.
I call it now a symbolic language. Ankhrasmation is a symbolic language because every symbol inside of it has to be interpreted based on the shapes which are the symbols, which are based on the color and there’s set of sonic units, rhythm units, velocity units, create units and all these things are concocted inside of a score which one would have to read in a way in which they can construct it for themselves because there’s no rules for it that you must read it this way or that way. It exists as a visual representation of the idea of music but it only comes alive when both are present … the visual aspect and the music that’s hidden inside of the images have been symbolically extracted from it.
Greatest artist of the 20thcentury?
Well, there’s a couple of them you can’t put it all in one. Creation itself tells us that everything is important, so I would say it like this and I would say it quite clearly. People like Bob Marley is one of the greatest artists ever. People like Miles Davis is one of the greatest artists ever. People like Bessie Smith is one of the greatest artist ever and people like that famous woman Billie Holiday one of the greatest artists ever. And I would add Michael Jackson. If you take those 5 artists and you look at what they did. They transformed the entire Earth. And people will say why didn’t you name Charlie Parker or why didn’t you name Duke Ellington or this or that person or why did you name four vocalists and one instrumentalist. The reason is very simple. Miles Davis if I had to select and the selection was based on life and death I would say that Miles Davis is the greatest artist ever. I would it say it because people are influenced by him. I say that because if you listen to his music it never ever gets old. It never ever becomes routine. It always opens up some kind of new inspiration for you whether you be a cook, or painter or a person that builds roads. It always opens up new ideas. These other four artists that I mentioned that’s also true about them but this guy played trumpet, he didn’t sing. He was on stage absolutely totally focused.
Something that irritates you?
There are things that irritate me but only for a few seconds. One of the things that’s most troublesome is when I spend a lot of time trying to explain to someone/anyone about the idea of Create and then they take it to be different semantics regarding improvisation and create. They’re entirely different. One of them is that Create is not based on the same way in which Prophets receive their message from the Almighty. The way scientists receive their inspiration to discover new things. They didn’t just find these things. First these things came to them as inspiration and then they found it. And when they found it we say that they made it. They didn’t make it they discovered it. It was already there. And that’s why Create is so important. It’s not about getting on stage and jumping in as fast as you can to see if you could lead the crowd or playing as long as you can not knowing when the end will come. Or because the nuance that goes back to when this kind of back to take place and people are not really playing from inspiration but they’re playing from a tradition that they have to write or play whatever they want played.
Is jazz a meaningful term?
No, it’s not. Just like the word Negro. It’s not meaningful either. I don’t believe that either one of them that is jazz or Negro was ever meaningful. I think that they were set up and as derogative terms in the very beginning and that because of African Americans in this society at the time had been so little political power that those terms were like forced terms. They were terms that nobody accepted but nobody could get rid of.
The meaning of tradition?
Tradition means that you observe what has been done before. That observation doesn’t mean that you have to learn how to do what tradition has done from the beginning to the end because that means that your life would be meaningless. But tradition means that you observe, either intellectually or culturally through some kind of perception about what that means and what has occurred before but you can only want and only gain access to tradition only when they add something to it. Not when they join it and just become practitioners of it. Every artist must add a niche though however thin it might be so that the tradition itself can grow and grow.
So, tradition is change?
Tradition is change, yes exactly. The same way like civilization. Civilization is a change of events that are constantly happening and there’s no one civilization more advanced than the other one. It is just that the intellectual properties and scientific properties are added of the past generations. But it’s the same civilization from beginning to end.
Role and responsibility of Music and Social Consciousness
I’ll tell you one thing that Bob Marley said. He said that you must make these songs so beautiful where people are singing and dance with you while you revolutionize their mind.
Underrated?
The whole idea of underrated is because everything else is overrated.
You already then answered my next question which is Overrated?
(Laughs)
Your greatest artistic triumph?
If you’re talking about projects and things that have been released, Ten Freedom Summers is probably the largest project. It’s four cd’s. Four and a half hours of music on cd and five and a half to six and a half hours in live performance. Takes three days to perform it. That would be one of the ways of thinking about it, but the truth is that I have projects that I’m working on now that are larger than that.
I have one project called Cosmic Music that has nine different ensembles and I started recording it last year. God willing it will take me another two years to record all of it. But nine different ensembles. Each ensemble being recorded by itself and then later spending a year constructing the ensembles just like the Nebulae of the Galaxy. That kind of way so that the only way to actually hear them as a cd or as an audio experience is that you hear all nine ensembles in a planetarium or in a football stadium or you have nine different sound systems with multiple speakers to play them. And that’s just one aspect.
I got a project that’s coming out in the next year hopefully, that consists of six different ensembles. So I don’t know. Ten Freedom Summers was 36 or 37 years in the making.
I have another combo that’s probably got eight or nine pieces in it with about two or three hours of music. I write music almost every day. I engage in this inspiration zone often. I’ve been in the house since the last week of February. I shut down a week early because I knew this pandemic was gonna be expansive. Inside the house I’ve made nine Ankhrasmation scores and of those nine, two are 40 Inches by 36.5 inches and a couple of them are 36 x 24 or 22 inches and the other ones are various dimensions between that and I’ve written a four movement suite about the pandemic. I have finished string quartet number 18 and 14 and I have two pages done of string quartet number 15. That’s all within the four or five months that I’ve been inside the house. That’s how I work.
Who would be your choice to have dinner with someone from the other side?
I would select someone who doesn’t talk much and there’s only one guy that doesn’t talk much and that’s Miles Davis. I would select Miles Davis.
Black Lives Matter?
BLM because if it didn’t matter, we would not ever have been suppressed and BLM because the world itself needs to be free from its own enemy. That is fear of others. BLM because if we are unable to understand BLM we would never ever achieve the goals of democracy. Some would pretend that democracy is always a work in progress. No, I disagree with that definition. Democracy has a set of principles It doesn’t take 50,000 billion years to make those principles work. It can work right away. We can grow as we work but the principles themselves should be applicable immediately. Without BLM that would never ever be understood because the North Atlantic slave trade that most of the world participated in, Europe and America, starting in the 11thcentury, was the most egregious atrocity against human beings in the history of the world. The middle passage from Africa to Europe and America, these boat rides, millions of people were destroyed. They would dock entire cargos of people into the ocean if 3 or 4 people got sick on the boat. Until BLM those issues would still be obscure and held outside the realm of redemption.
If you could do it all over again, one thing that you would do differently….
I don’t believe that if I changed the direction of my life it would be different. So that means that I would not do anything differently.
Reflections and Meditations on Monk?
Well Monk and I are actually twins. We weren’t born together by the same mother but artistically we are the same twins. I am more like him and he is more like me. My music is closer to his music than any other artist out there. It’s only because I play the trumpet and that I have a fantastic sound and that I have good musicality, people always put me in the zone towards Miles Davis but the truth is I am more like Monk than any of these people in the history of this creative music. Our creativity ran in a similar way. He has played all his life mostly his music I have played all of my life most of my music unless I play with some other creative musician. He was a loner; I am a loner. I enjoy being by myself and working and I know that Monk did too. I just wish that they had better treatment for depression back when he was alive than they did so he could’ve enjoyed his last 10 years much more. He’s a great visionary.
Three wishes
Having the capacity to publish my three books that I’m working on.
To record those big projects that I just mentioned.
Spend more time with my granddaughters and grandson and daughters.
Your recent project with Deer Hoof…
That was a great project. It came about because they were going to play at the Winter Fest in New York city and La Poisson Rouge or one of those places and somebody approached my manager and asked them if I would be interested in doing a stint with them and I said yes! They immediately worked on the project and got it going. Before that about 3 or 4 years ago I played in LA at this big rock venue called Echoplex in LA with Deer Hoof. Unfortunately, that one was not recorded but that was my first time playing with the band. I know the performers really well in the band Greg and the others. They used to come to my performance when I would play in the Bay Area a lot and they would always stay and hang out and talk with me and stuff like that. I would give them products to listen to and they would give me stuff. So we have a pretty good history off stage and on stage.
Name three unsung heroes
Booker Little, Minnie Riperton. Hmmmm…well I want to mention one person who was the most famous guy on earth at one time; Muhammad Ali. The reason I say that he’s unsung because when he became Muhammad Ali, he received some of the greatest hatred that any famous person could ever receive. Probably only second to Michael Jackson.
Sound (your own sound) seems fundamental to how we perceive music or anything that is related to music
That’s true yes. But what’s not part of that is the quality of sound. My sound for me has always been important but what made it important for me is that when I was growing up as a kid, I played a lot outside. I played not only outside but in the entrance areas of forests and woodlands. Because of that I was given the possibility of hearing how sound can be qualified. What kind of quality you could put on it. And those things have informed my sound for the last 65 or 70 years
A question that should have been asked but wasn’t
That’s always a hard one when you have a good thorough interview. This interview has been pretty thorough. Let me say this I make a statement as a way of doing it
My statement is for young people, young artists and I’m going to call them developing artists because most of them don’t like that word, but I think that they should understand that developing artists means something very important for me and my older colleagues out here. Always try to make art from inspiration that is through performing and composing and thinking. Don’t forget that you are also an intellectual being, don’t forget to write about how you feel and what you think and don’t forget to challenge each other about what a performance that you heard or participated in was like and about. You don’t have to say that was a bad performance, but you can engage by asking how would you describe what you just did or heard and in what way did it satisfy you? Do you think it made an impact on the audience? This way you can create a dialogue about intention. What was intended and what was the result and those kinds of things help us to develop into excellent human beings; not just artists.