Wadada Leo Smith Featured On Deerhoof's New Live Album – Proceeds To Black Lives Matter

Deerhoof today announced that their new live album To Be Surrounded By Beautiful, Curious, Breathing, Laughing Flesh Is Enoughwill be released as a Bandcamp exclusive on July 3rd, 2020, via Joyful Noise Recordings.

Sharing its name with a line from Walt Whitman's "I Sing The Body Electric" and comprising 11 beloved tracks not found on Deerhoof's last live album (Fever 121614), the new live album captures the band of Satomi Matsuzaki, Ed Rodriguez, John Dieterich, and Greg Saunier in peak form and culminates in a thrilling five-song collaborative set with legendary avant-garde trumpeter/composer Wadada Leo Smith as part of New York City's Winter Jazzfest at Le Poisson Rouge. All album proceeds will benefit Black Lives Matter, and the digital pre-order is now available to purchase HERE alongside a stream of the first preview track featuring Smith, "Breakup Songs."

Wadada Leo Smith says of the organization: "Black Lives Matter has been doing fantastic work in keeping the rights and the liberty issues up-front in the minds of the Americans and international peoples. I think that BLM organization is an excellent place to give support to and to help bring democratic practices into the American society. Since in today's world, true democracy is not practiced anywhere on the planet. Human Rights is a colossal type of event for anyone to realize, and it's hard to do. But it must be done and I believe it can be achieved. What makes it so hard is that true democratic principles demand that all human beings respect the rights of others, and that we develop the capacity to share the wealth, the power and the earth and the sky together, with the condition that we collectively work to build a peaceful world. For all of us!"

Saunier adds: "Part of what makes touring life so great was how unpredictable it is. All the unexpected encounters, promoters and audiences and performers willing to take a risk. That's what playing together with Wadada was for us. The corporate world seems to want to define 'musician' as 'internet content competitor' but the actual people who make music have to find ways out of that trap. That's why I'm touched that a master improviser like Wadada would bring up true democracy. To me, democracy and improvisation are linked, and they appear spontaneously at times like these, when strangers come together to take action, and there is no rulebook."

To Be Surrounded By Beautiful, Curious, Breathing, Laughing Flesh Is Enough follows the late May digital release of Deerhoof's critically acclaimed studio album, Future Teenage Cave Artists (Joyful Noise Recordings), available in vinyl at retail as of Friday, June 19th. Future Teenage Cave Artists has earned Deerhoof career-high reviews from Loud & Quiet (9/10), Exclaim! (9/10), Uncut (4/5), Mojo (4/5), Bust (4/5), All Music (4/5), and more. Singles included "The Loved One" and its video made from fan submissions, "Damaged Eyes Squinting into the Beautiful Overhot Sun," released alongside an instructional video featuring guitarists Ed Rodriguez and John Dieterich for Guitar World's Sick Riffs series that teaches fans how to play the song, the album's title track, and "'Farewell' Symphony," which was released with a video supercut of six performances of the last movement of Franz Joseph Haydn's "'Farewell' Symphony" edited by Greg Saunier. Future Teenage Cave Artists is available to stream HERE and for physical order HERE.

Trumpeter, multi-instrumentalist and composer Wadada Leo Smith is one of the most boldly original and influential artists of his time. Transcending the bounds of genre or idiom, he distinctly defines his music, tirelessly inventive in both sound and approach, as "Creative Music."

For the last five decades, Smith has been a member of the legendary AACM collective, pivotal in its wide-open perspectives on music and art in general. He has carried those all-embracing concepts into his own work, expanding upon them in myriad ways.
Throughout his career, Smith has been recognized for his groundbreaking body of work. A finalist for the 2013 Pulitzer Prize in Music, he received the 2016 Doris Duke Artist Award and earned an honorary doctorate from CalArts, where he was also celebrated as Faculty Emeritus. In addition, he received the Hammer Museum's 2016 Mohn Award for Career Achievement "honoring brilliance and resilience." In 2018 he received the Religion and The Arts Award from the American Academy of Religion.

Smith regularly earns multiple spots on the DownBeat International Critics Poll. In 2017 he topped three categories: Best Jazz Artist, Trumpeter of the Year and Jazz Album of the Year, and was featured as the subject of a cover story in August 2017. The Jazz Journalists Association also honored Smith as their 2017 Musician of the Year as well as 2017 Duo of the Year for his work with Vijay Iyer. The JJA named him their 2016 Trumpeter of the Year, 2015 Composer of the Year, and 2013 Musician of the Year, and he has earned top billing in two categories in the JazzTimes Critics Poll as Artist of the Year and Composer of the Year.

In October 2015 The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago presented the first comprehensive exhibition of Smith's Ankhrasmation scores, which use non-standard visual directions, making them works of art in themselves as well as igniting creative sparks in the musicians who perform them. In 2016, these scores were also featured in exhibitions at the Hammer Museum, and the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts and Kadist in San Francisco.

Born December 18, 1941 in Leland, Mississippi, Smith's early musical life began at age thirteen when he became involved with the Delta blues and jazz traditions performing with his stepfather, bluesman Alex Wallace. He received his formal musical education from the U.S. Military band program (1963), the Sherwood School of Music (1967-69), and Wesleyan University (1975-76).

Smith has released more than 50 albums as a leader on labels including ECM, Moers, Black Saint, Tzadik, Pi Recordings, TUM, Leo and Cuneiform. His diverse discography reveals a recorded history centered around important issues that have impacted his world, exploring the social, natural and political environment of his times with passion and fierce intelligence. His most recent recording is 2019's Rosa Parks: Pure Love, an Oratorio of Seven Songs. His 2016 recording, America's National Parks earned a place on numerous best of the year lists including the New York Times, NPR Music and many others. Smith's landmark 2012 civil rights opus Ten Freedom Summers was called "A staggering achievement [that] merits comparison to Coltrane's A Love Supreme in sobriety and reach." Writing about Smith's 2017 album Solo: Reflections and Meditations on Monk in the New York Review of Books, Adam Shatz notes: "For all the minimalism of his sound, Smith has turned out to be a maximalist in his ambitions, evolving into one of our most powerful storytellers, an heir to American chroniclers like Charles Ives and Ornette Coleman."

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