Wadada Leo Smith trumpet, fluegelhorn, koto, mbira, harmonica, bamboo notch flute, percussion, vocal Technologies here.) Wadada Leo Smith: Kulture Jazz (ECM 1507) Here you will find no towering, canonical monuments, but only ruins of such raw power that every crumbling edifice yields the scripture of change. A reverse alchemy that turns gold into lead. The Akashic meditation is not a conversation but a conversion. As distant as he is present, he is a nomad in search of the next melodic attachment.ĭistortions in both look back with forward eyes as regularity subsumes, is subsumed, and touches off a limpid and final spark after an elliptical net catches Smith’s reborn self. His breath, the written word to Laswell’s speech, resonates through a brass menagerie of travel.
Cosmic brush with every stroke iyer skin#
Smith, for his part, treats the skin as a palimpsest of discovery. It listens to its own heartbeat and tracks the decimation of rhythms. It is at one moment a bodhisattva of desert suns, the next a dying gamelan courting the moon. And because the machinations of that instrument rotate on linguistic axes, a sense of communication is vital to understanding his improvisational cartography. His bass flashes and writhes with intrigue, far more than the sum of its plastic, wood, and strings. Laswell has a leviathan’s heart for this stuff. The psycho-sphere of these spiraling prevarications acts as glue for a jagged infrastructure. Consciousness on either side denies the illusion of consensus reality and offers a purely sound-based alternative in its place. Smith’s entry comes from within rather than from without, portioning flesh on scales counterweighted with virtue. Laswell slows the dance of time to near-stillness, so that every contraction of every muscle may be studied. In this spontaneous set, listeners may open their eyes, only to find themselves behind another’s closed. A metropolis unto themselves, built by a masonry of interlocking musicality. Soul-seeking trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith and sought soul, bassist Bill Laswell, recorded live at New York City’s The Stone on April 22, 2014. Wadada Leo Smith & Bill Laswell: Akashic Meditation The end effect rolls itself into a seed of origins, ready to sprout at the slightest contact of our listening water.
Smith’s “Marian Anderson,” dedicated to the contralto and civil rights activist of the same name, fits together broader temporal scaffolding upon a likeminded foundation. If Iyer’s pianism speaks in acrylics, then Smith’s trumpeting revels in the split tails of calligraphic brushstrokes, reading between their lines a language of metonymic potency. What begins as a delicate, John Cagean landscape morphs into a bolder ode to time and space.
Iyer’s “Passage” refuses to see either palette or canvas as flat surfaces, emphasizing instead their three-dimensionality and capacity for absorption. Their investigation is bookended by two outlying compositions. The forensic tools required to piece these together into a coherent identity are as much drawn from the listeners as the performers. Along every crease in between-whether through the muted proclamations of “The empty mind receives,” the frenetic grammars of “Labyrinths” and “A cold fire,” or the ambient depths of “A divine courage”-we encounter a biographical fingerprint. These dynamics fluctuate all the way to “Notes on water,” in which synthesized elements bring the suite to its origami conclusion. Instead, it marvels at its own narrative unfolding, one word at a time.
There’s tension here, but it has no teeth to masticate Iyer’s block chords. “All becomes alive” introduces electronic augury as spinal tap, while Smith’s castings reveal a divination that feels simultaneously digital and analog. The seven-part a cosmic rhythm with each stroke came about in response to Indian artist Nasreen Mohamedi (1937-1990), whose diary yields every title therein.
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