Wadada Leo Smith
Kulture Jazz (ECM 1507), Saturn, Conjunct the Grand Canyon in a Sweet Embrace (Pi P110), The Year of the Elephant (Pi P104) and Wisdom in Time (Intakt CD 128).

WHEN I first heard the glory of Wadada Leo Smith’s trumpet ringing through Conway Hall in 2010, blowing at the Freedom of the City festival of improvised music with two powerful drummers, Steve Noble and Louis Moholo-Moholo, it was as if breath itself had become a messenger of hope and beauty.

Smith was born in Leland, Mississippi, in 1941 and took up drums, French horn and mellophone as a boy before settling on trumpet. He played in R’n’B groups before becoming an early member of Chicago’s Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), then formed the Creative Construction Company while sojourning in Paris with revolutionary musical confreres, violinist Leroy Jenkins and saxophonist Anthony Braxton.

Back stateside in Connecticut he founded his own label, Kabell, and a musicians’ co-operative, the Creative Musicians’ Improvising Forum. He organised tours of Europe, collaborated with fellow jazz adventurers Henry Threadgill, Roscoe Mitchelland, Sheffielder Derek Bailey, and by the mid-1980s he had embraced rastafarianism and started another band called Sphinx, which played an amalgam of jazz, rock and reggae.

By 1993 he had been awarded the Dizzy Gillespie Chair at the California Institute of Arts.

In 1992 he recorded Kulture Jazz for the Munich-based ECM label, employing seven instruments plus trumpet and voice in a tribute to the passed jazz genius of elders like Armstrong, Holiday, Coltrane and Ayler in the context of fiery evocations of the Mississippi Delta blues, Ellington’s “sublime reminiscences in tempo,” Satchmo and King Oliver’s “universal light,” Billie’s “majestic gold-voice” and Buddy Bolden’s pioneering “rising from the ancestors’ stool.” His lucid, cutting horn sears through the tracks with a muscular and burnished sonic beauty bursting through his Song of Humanity, the unaccompanied sheer power of Louis Armstrong Counterpointing and the insurgent notes of Uprising.

The Year of the Elephant of 2002 has Wadada in the setting of the “golden quartet” of pianist Anthony Davis, bassist of the Art Ensemble of Chicago Malachi Favors Maghostut and the mighty drummer Jack DeJohnette.

Favors and DeJohnette lay down a delving, crunching beat on the opener Al-Madinah with Davis’s skittering phrases and Wadada’s slicing notes. Piru is a love theme and Favors’s rooted bass surfaces from the deepest earth below the tender beauty of Smith’s horn.

This is a record of four masters engaged with tradition, with resonating sound quality exposing an amalgam of jazz brilliance. Hear Wadada’s precipitous candences in Kangaroo’s Hollow or DeJohnette’s rattling snares on the title tune before the onward rush of brass. Davis’s lyricism introduces the suite dedicated to his namesake Miles, Miles Star, and its final movement, Blue Fire, cries out with a precious and scintillating musical message.

In 2003 in a New York studio, Wadada paired up with one of his early associates, Braxton, to record an album of three long, searching and interplanetary tracks — Saturn, Conjunct the Grand Canyon in a Sweet Embrace.

Braxton plays four saxophones (F, Eb Alto, Bb Soprano and Eb Soprano) and Wadada both trumpet and flugelhorn as they revisit Sun Ra’s spirit and explore their threesome sonic universe.

Simply listening to this record is an astonishing experience, with Wadada’s flights of brass freedom and daring in the 29 minutes of composition No 316 and Braxton’s seemingly endless birdsong. The use of pause and space by the two hornmen in Goshawk creates a suspense of time that befits nature and all its life itself, and you come from its hearing filled with sheer wonder.

Wisdom in Time cuts another duo session, but here Wadada shows his enduring bond and boyhood love for the drums alongside the extraordinary German drummer Gunter Baby Sommer.

The opener, A Sonic Voice Inclosed in the Wind is a multidimensional, intercontinental saga, with Sommer’s skins, woods, gongs and cymbals pounding, flickering, echoing, rattling and fluttering beside Wadada’s all-stretching horn, making an empathy of sound between two hugely contrasting histories.

Tarantella Rusticana is like a loving fanfare for a rattlesnake, or hear Wadada’s terse notes on Gassire’s Lute, or the joint exploration of Woodland Trail to the Giants with Sommer playing a large slit drum. Wadada brings electronics to Rain Cycles and a beautiful serenity of sound is achieved on the final A Silent Letter to Someone. Two huge jazz talents at work and in union: a record of many marvels.