A lifelong individualist whose unique philosophy has often resulted in recordings that transcend commonly accepted ideas and attitudes about music, trumpeter and multi-instrumentalist
Ishmael Wadada Leo Smith has devoted his life to the theory and practice of creative improvisation. A cardinal member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians and a close friend of
Anthony Braxton's,
Smith is an inspiring example of someone who has voluntarily chosen a path that parallels Surrealist philosopher André Breton's assessment of music as "the immediate, pervading, uncriticizable communication of being." Although closely aligned with what critics call avant-garde jazz,
Leo Smith has correctly stated that his trumpeting is a direct outgrowth of an entire tradition, from
King Oliver and
Louis Armstrong through
Roy Eldridge,
Dizzy Gillespie, and
Miles Davis.
Born in Leland, MS on December 18, 1941,
Leo Smith grew up in a cultural environment largely devoted to sacred church and secular blues music. His stepfather Alex "Little Bill" Wallace was a guitarist and personal friend of
B.B. King.
Smith has said that he never considered the blues to be a closed form, let alone something that had to occur within a 12-bar formula: "The blues is exactly, in my way of understanding it, a free music." After studying with his father, playing in high school concert and marching bands, and gigging with local rhythm & blues groups, he served "five years in six army bands -- four in the U.S. and two in Europe," then studied at the Sherwood School of Music in Chicago from 1967-1969.
Smith's first recordings were made with bluesman
Little Milton Campbell for the Chess label. When offered a steady position as overseer of the horn section in
Little Milton's road band,
Smith turned it down.
Soon after being introduced to a progressive community of young musicians by
Anthony Braxton and
Roscoe Mitchell,
Smith joined the AACM in 1967, and visited Paris as a member of the Creative Construction Company with
Braxton, violinist
Leroy Jenkins, and drummer
Steve McCall.
Smith may be heard on
Braxton's albums 3 Compositions of New Jazz (1968) and B-XO/N-O-1-47A (recorded in Paris in 1969) as well as
Muhal Richard Abrams' Young at Heart/Wise in Time, Kalaparusha Maurice McIntyre's Humility in the Light of the Creator, and synthesized upright bass wizard
Melvin Jackson's
Funky Skull.
Smith's next move was to establish his own record label (Kabell) and to form the New Dalta Ahkri collective, first with pianist
Anthony Davis and bassist Wes Brown, and later with drummer
Pheeroan Ak Laff and saxophonist
Oliver Lake.
Smith's recording activity during the early to mid-'70s included Comme a la Radio with poet and vocalist
Brigitte Fontaine;
Duets and
Geechee Recollections with alto saxophonist and flutist
Marion Brown; The Gardens of Harlem with
Clifford Thornton and the Jazz Composer's Orchestra; Flam with tenor saxophonist
Frank Lowe, and For Players Only with
Leroy Jenkins. He also participated in the New York
Wildflowers loft sessions and was heard on guitarist
Michael Gregory Jackson's album Clarity.
While enrolled at Wesleyan University in 1975-1976,
Smith conducted research into the musical cultures of Native America, West Africa, Indonesia, and Japan, conceiving and establishing his own jazz/world music theory and designing an original notational system used to coordinate sound, rhythm, silence, and improvisation; related to but distinct from
Anthony Braxton's personal galaxy of concepts, images, and music. Like
Muhal Richard Abrams and
Roscoe Mitchell,
Smith established neologisms to represent or signify important developments in his theory and practice of creativity. These include Ahkreanvention, Ankhrasmation, and Reflectativity. The AACM's multi-instrumentalism came naturally to
Smith, who encouraged participants to "approach all of their instruments as one complete instrument" or "component parts of the total instrument." A dramatic demonstration of this principle occurred during a duo tour with
Joseph Jarman involving dozens of instruments and an improvising dancer.
From 1978-1985
Smith was able to record no less than ten albums, including
Divine Love (an ECM date involving
Lester Bowie,
Kenny Wheeler, and
Charlie Haden) and Budding of a Rose (as well as
Roscoe Mitchell's Sketches from Bamboo), recorded with a Creative Orchestra in Paris during 1979. A collaborative album with Canadian soprano saxophonist
Bill Smith was released in 1983 under the title Rastafari, creating delicious confusion among people who expected it to sound like
Black Uhuru rather than freely improvised expressions of a creative intelligence that took into account music and cultures from literally all over the world. The album's title did in fact reflect a turning point in
Smith's spiritual path, as he embraced Rastafarianism and prefaced his given name with Wadada, an Ethiopian word meaning Love. Years later he would cross over to Islam and amend his name further to become
Ishmael Wadada Leo Smith.
Since the early 1990s his artistry has expanded and blossomed to include numerous solo recordings and collaborations with a wide range of creative individuals including his wife, the poet Harumi Makino Smith; vocalist
Jeanne Lee, and guitarist
Henry Kaiser, with whom he cooked up the
Miles Davis tribute album
Yo Miles! in 1998. Several albums that subsequently appeared on
John Zorn's Tzadik label include Luminous Axis, a project involving computer-driven electronics, and Lake Biwa, featuring another Creative Orchestra, now with saxophonist
Zorn, pianist
Craig Taborn, cellist
Erik Friedlander, and tubaist
Marcus Rojas. During the first decade of the 21st century,
Smith's collaborators included his lifelong friend and fellow composer, educator, philosopher, and improviser
Anthony Braxton; percussionist
Adam Rudolph, bassists
Malachi Favors Magoustous, and
John Lindberg, drummers
Jack DeJohnette and
Ronald Shannon Jackson, the Nda Kulture group, the
Golden Quartet, and Kurdistan-born composer
Alan Kushan.
Ishmael Wadada Leo Smith has taught at several colleges in the U.S., served residencies at universities in Belgium, Canada, Iceland, Italy, and Japan, and was the first to hold the
Dizzy Gillespie Chair at the California Institute of the Arts, where he heads the program in African-American Improvisation. ~ arwulf arwulfT®