Ishmael Wadada Leo Smith

Thanks to old friends and some vaguely related legal work, I was sitting last night in a vintage swivel chair in a Williamsburg performance space watching Ishmael Wadada Leo Smith being “honored to be honored” (his words) by the Festival of New Trumpet Music (FONT). Then he proceeded to play a lot of loud trumpet in a duet with Pheeroan Ak Laff . The drummer appeared to lead, the trumpeter appeared to follow, playing intermittent bursts over and off the percussion, but sectioning it off and telescoping its time axis. Then at the end of the program, the honoree trumpeter got all four of the other trumpeters who were there that night on stage with him and played a lot of soft trumpet at them, which was even more alarming. I’ve been listening to this man’s records for almost thirty years and even the pieces I’ve played over and over, like “Images” and “Divine Love,” I still can’t describe accurately. I always remember them as motionless and pointillist, and maybe they are, but whenever I play them I’m always shocked at how aggressive they actually sound without any discernible pulse (usually). My understanding of his self-designed notation is limited to how he's described it: a system that organizes his pieces (solo and group) into episodic event cells, with a set of appropriate contingencies for the players at each station. If you bear down as a listener, you can convince yourself (maybe) that you’re hearing how all of that structuring works as the pieces unwind. But they don’t unwind. Time doesn’t just pass and it is not marked. Something has to happen at a sufficient level of intensity such that something else can happen next, something that absolutely must happen, and then it has to stop and vanish.

(P.S. Thanks for the photo, Frank.)