Wadada Leo Smith
Sonic rivers
Tzadik introduces its new Spectrum series with a very special and exciting new group featuring three of the most creative wind players in new music. Friends and colleagues since the ’70s, these three musicians share a vision of improvisation and composition that is unique, virtuosic and cooperative. Performing compositions and collective improvisations, they sculpt sound and silence with masterly assurance. Surprising yet completely inevitable, this is an essential document of improvisational mu…
Heart's Reflection
An incredible double CD from trumpeter Leo Smith's Organic with Michael Gregory, Pheeroan AkLaff, Angelica Sanchez, Skuli Sverrisson, Brandon Ross, &c &c... incredible electric and acoustic jazz from the legendary improviser and innovator!"Lauded as "one of the most vital musicians on the planet" by Coda, Wadada Leo Smith is one of the most visionary, boldly original and artistically important figures in contemporary American jazz and free music, and one of the most distinctive trumpet pla…
Abbey Road Quartet
These quartet recordings feature the improvisational skills of trumpeter Ishmael Wadada Leo Smith, guitarist John Coxon, keyboard player Pat Thomas and drummer Mark Sanders - an ensemble that convened at Abbey Road Studios last year to commit these five pieces to tape. Wadada takes the lead, perhaps most staunchly reminding you that this is, at heart, a jazz album thanks to his florid, lyrical phrasing. The relationships formed between the instruments are an immediate source of intrigue, forming…
Light Upon Light
Trumpeter, multi-instrumentalist, improviser and theoretician, Wadada Leo Smith is one of the most important composers of our time. An original member of Chicago's AACM, his exciting pieces blending composition and mprovisation have been performed by many of the world's most important ensembles and soloists. Featuring an exotic composition for chamber ensemble and gamelan quartet, a beautiful solo piece for viola, a bass concerto written for virtuoso Bert Turetzky and two electronic pieces featu…
Luminous Axis (The Caravans Of Winter And Summer)
Luminous Axis (subtitled The Caravans of Winter and Summer) is an album by American jazz trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith recorded in 2002 and released on Tzadik Records' Composer Series. This adventurous recording marks one of Smith's most exciting forays into electronic music, featuring an extended suite for four laptops and trumpet, two duets with Ikue Mori, and a composition featuring percussionist William Winant. A relentless musical innovator since his early days in the Chicago AACM (Association…