Wadada Leo Smith Premieres 4-Day Work AMERICA TRANSFORMED At Brooklyn College, September 8–11
At 81 years of age, Wadada Leo Smith is deep in the midst of the most creative and prolific period of an already formidable career.
By: A.A. Cristi Aug. 14, 2023
At 81 years of age, Wadada Leo Smith is deep in the midst of the most creative and prolific period of an already formidable career.
On the heels of a yearlong 80th birthday celebration that featured a number of dazzling performances along with several large-scale releases, the visionary composer and trumpeter will premiere his most monumental work to date. From September 8 to 11 at Brooklyn College’s Leonard & Claire Tow Center for the Performing Arts, Smith will present the debut of America Transformed: The Realization of a Constitutional Dream is the Key to America’s Salvation, a striking and ambitious masterpiece featuring three ensembles performing eight hours of music over the course of four nights. Four distinct performances will take place at 7:30pm each night in the Don Buchwald Theater. Tickets are available for $20/$10 for students at https://www.brooklyn.edu/towcenter.
America Transformed is a spiritual sequel to Smith’s much-lauded masterwork Ten Freedom Summers, which was named a finalist for the 2013 Pulitzer Prize in music. Where that monumental piece encompassed a decade in America’s struggle for Civil Rights, America Transformed, written over a 37-year period, widens the lens even further, exploring the cultural influencers and social activists who have fought to realize the Constitutional promise of freedom and equality for all in the United States.
“Ten Freedom Summers was focused essentially on the African-American experience,” Smith explains. “America Transformed looks at all of the people and elements that have changed our society. It basically covers those Americans who didn't come from Europe. A lot of people call us minorities, but there are no minorities in America. If you have American citizenship, how can you be in a minority?”
September’s world premiere of America Transformed will be realized by three stellar ensembles. The RedKoral Quartet, featuring violinists Shalini Vijayan and Mona Tian, violist Andrew McIntosh and cellist Ashley Walters, which recorded Smith’s first twelve string quartets for a seven-CD boxed set released by TUM Records in 2022; America Transformed expands that magnum opus with four more pieces, some of them incorporating the soprano vocalist Karen Parks.
Smith’s newest ensemble, Kikuyu, includes Smith on trumpet and Walters on cello along with the pianists Erika Dohi and Sylvie Courvoisier and the drummers Pheeroan akLaff (a longtime collaborator of the composer’s) and Frank Morrison. The evening will also feature a large orchestra comprising faculty and students of the Brooklyn College Conservatory of Music and the Aaron Copland School of Music at Queens College.
Each evening of the four-concert event will include one of Smith’s latest string quartets. Quartets 13-15 are each dedicated to the corresponding Amendment to the U.S Constitution: the 13th Amendment, abolishing slavery; the 14th Amendment, affording citizenship rights and equal protection under law to all U.S. citizens; and the 15thAmendment, guaranteeing the right to vote regardless of race.
The remaining pieces on Friday’s opening night reveal the broad scope of Smith’s vision for the piece. The opening String Quartet No. 13 will be followed by “Mercy 1,” performed by Kikuyu, the first half of a two-part composition composed during the pandemic and dedicated to first responders; “Loving Kindness,” written for a quartet of E-flat clarinet, trombone, piano and cello; “Chaco Canyon, The Ancient Pueblo Civilization,” a four-part suite for Kikuyu paying homage to the pre-Columbian society of the American Southwest; and “Solidarity, Rights and the Conditions of Workers and the Equal Distribution of Capital,” an orchestral piece commissioned by Poland’s NFM Wrocław Philharmonic that takes the history of workers’ rights back to the encyclical issued by Pope Leo XIII in 1891.
Saturday’s music includes dedications to two subjects who recur often in Smith’s work: Martin Luther King, Jr. and Muhammad Ali. “A person’s life is very complex and there are multiple viewpoints from which to engage with them or talk about them,” the composer says. Another frequent inspiration, Thelonious Monk, is the honoree of a piece that will close Sunday night’s concert. Saturday ends with “That Sunday Morning,” a tribute to the four young victims of the tragic 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963, written in dialogue with John Coltrane’s “Alabama.”
Sunday also features two pieces written for influential African-Americans: “Lorraine Vivian Hansberry,” a work for flute quartet in homage to the playwright of “A Raisin in the Sun;” and “Emmett Till, Mrs. Till; Again, Can You See the Light,” titled for the 14-year old victim of lynching in 1955 Mississippi and his defiant mother. Till’s murder, Smith says, “was one of the most important moments in America where the issue of race was put front and center, along with the Dred Scott decision in 1857,” that he explored in Ten Freedom Summers. The orchestral piece “Ta’if – The Delta / Leland” is Smith’s most autobiographical piece in the work, examining the connection between his own Mississippi hometown of Leland and the Saudi Arabian city of Ta’if, an unlikely connection made via his Muslim faith.
The weekend’s finale takes place on Monday, September 11, and appropriately much of the evening is dedicated to memorializing the victims of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001. Opening with Kikuyu’s “Ceremony and Remembrance of the Nine Eleven Victims,” the program continues with “String Quartet No. 16: Flight Ninety-Three, in Pennsylvania’s Sky.” The scene then shifts to an earlier era-defining American tragedy with “JFK in Dallas: Parkland: 11.22.1963.” The two final pieces celebrate the country’s Asian-American population and the late South African singer, songwriter and activist Miriam Makeba.
“America Transformed focuses on America as a larger idea for equality,” Smith says. “The collections are centered around those individuals, events and ideas that forced the articles of the Constitution to be employed and enforced by Congress into protecting the interests of the American people.”
Trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith was part of the first generation of musicians to come out of Chicago‘s Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) and has established himself as one of the leading composers and performers of creative contemporary music. Since the early 1970s Smith has mostly led his own groups, including the ensembles New Dalta Akhri, N’Da Kulture, the Golden Quartet and Quintet, the Silver Orchestra, Organic, Mbira, the Great Lakes Quartet and Najwa. His epic tribute to the Civil Rights movement, Ten Freedom Summers, was one of three finalists for the Pulitzer Prize in Music in 2013. From 2021-22, Smith celebrated his 80th birthday with a stunning series of releases on TUM Records, including a set of solo trumpet music; a meeting of masters with Bill Laswell and Milford Graves; trumpet-drum duos with Pheeroan akLaff, Andrew Cyrille, Han Bennink and Jack DeJohnette; a trio outing with DeJohnette and Vijay Iyer; a set by his Great Lakes Quartet featuring Henry Threadgill; and the seven-volume collection String Quartets Nos. 1 – 12. His most recent album, Fire Illuminations(Kabell), features his exhilarating all-star ensemble Orange Wave Electric including Nels Cline, Bill Laswell, Melvin Gibbs, Brandon Ross and Hardedge.
Wadada Leo Smith – America Transformer
World Premiere September 8-11, 2023
Leonard & Claire Tow Center for the Performing Arts, Brooklyn College
2900 Bedford Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11210
7pm doors/7:30 performance, $20/$10 students
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