Civil Rights in Concert
"Uprising" (complete version) by Wadada Leo Smith & Ed Blackwell
Theodor Adorno, writing in Los Angeles in the early '40s, argued that jazz, like modern classical, has "the dissociation of musical time. Music formulates a design of the world, which—for better or worse—no longer recognizes history." Wadada Leo Smith's Ten Freedom Summers suite, which debuted at REDCAT in downtown L.A. on October 28 of this year, stands as a strong testament against that statement. Smith's composition, performed over three nights, is an extended meditation on important figures and events from a ten-year span of the Civil Rights Movement, 1954–1964. Employing both Southwest Chamber Music, a nine-member chamber ensemble conducted by Jeff von der Schmidt, and his own Golden Quartet, Ten Freedom Summers follows a twenty-one-point historical progression over the course of three performances, with Friday's concert progressing from "Dred Scott: 1857" to "John F. Kennedy's New Frontier and the Space Age, 1960." The jazz group, set up on stage right, performed the first two compositions and then more or less alternated movements with the chamber ensemble on stage left. Occasionally—awesomely—they overlapped in a conversation that teased at pushing the "double quartet" format from Ornette Coleman's 1960 classic Free Jazz to a new frontier.
Smith led the quartet with his own trumpet, playing loudly, warningly, remonstratively. Like Monk, he seemed unwilling to play a soft note. At one point, he lowered his horn so close to a floor mic that the recording device practically entered the instrument like a mute.
Smith's style is marked by a vertiginous flow of notes. His fingers nervously flutter up and down over the trumpet's valves for a few seconds before he even blows a sound. And he modeled his rhythm section after his own image: Anthony Davis, who professorially commanded the piano, tended to rely on both fingers and palms; Susie Ibarra played airily at the cymbals; and John Lindberg, on bass, made liberal use of the bow. Unlike some double bassists who, while playing freely with other musicians onstage, will lean one ear towards their instrument like an old watchmaker to make sure their thing is still keeping time, Lindberg thumped away athletically—sweatband and all—so that his sound was always at the front and center. I bobbed my head with professional disinterest throughout.
And while the compositions and the use of baritone sax in the ensemble seemed to give a nod to Anthony Braxton, one of Smith's early collaborators, the classical side of the stage seemed to play in an entirely different mode—sometimes it was almost like two concerts at once.
A video projection by Ismail Ali and Robert Fenz that accompanied much of the performance showed live video of the artists onstage enhanced with psychedelic graphics. It was an effect that recalled the bootleg Sun Ra VHS tapes I rented in high school from a sketchy, second-story establishment that used the tapes as window dressing for skin flicks. Smith was depicted with rays of light coming out of him, in negative with a white face or his face blotted out, and with a periscope on his chest. Although slightly distracting from the performance, three historical photographs incorporated into the video served to helpfully locate the music in the set. At the opening of the second piece in the collection called "Al Hajj Malik Al Shabazz and The People of the Shahadah," the video showed a picture of Malcolm X, wearing a sweater and smiling. As Ibarra led the band into "Freedom Summer: Voter Registration, an Act of Compassion and Empowerment, 1964"—first with mallets, then in a mesmerizing groove á la Miles Davis's Filles de Kilimanjaro (1968)—a photo from the Mississippi Freedom Summer of 1964 appeared on screen. The last section was accompanied by a photo of a man on the moon.
Smith, a kind-eyed gentleman of sixty or so with a salt-and-pepper beard and long, thin dreadlocks, stood at center stage wearing a heavily starched white suit, his face twisted in deep concentration. The stiff white exterior, along with the topic of the evening, made me think of the new Martin Luther King, Jr., monument in Washington, D.C., which depicts the Civil Rights leader in a slab of white granite with his arms crossed in a chillingly forced posture. Smith's impressionistic approach to memorializing the Civil Rights movement couldn't be more different. And it also distinguishes itself from currents within the free jazz tradition. Smith separates himself from the strand of free jazz that unsubtly puts its political message at the fore. See, for example, saxophonist Joe McPhee's energetic "Nation Time" (1970), in which musicians scream, "What time is it? Nation time!" or the ursine German alto-sax player Peter Brötzmann's album, Fuck de Boere (originally recorded in 1970).
Despite the fact that the music of Ten Freedom Summers suite is stirringly beautiful in its own right, its understated allusions present the opposite problem, namely how to understand the symbolism of evocatively titled free-form music. It makes sense that "Emmett Till: Defiant, Fearless" opens with a march and that "The Washington D.C. Memorial Wall" incorporates the tinny, military wails of a Harmon-buzzed trumpet. The section on the Space Age features tympanis and ends in a dramatic drone. But, at most points, the listener has to rely on program notes to find his place in the history.
Smith himself admits this is a problem without a solution and part of the challenge of his work. Speaking to me a day after the final concert, Smith said he asked himself while composing, "How can you express the Voter Registration Act in music?" Some of his references would be almost impossible for the average listener to pick up on. Hidden in parts of the score, for example, are gematria-like patterns in the scales that add up to significant numbers, such as sixty-four. But the main point of Ten Freedom Summers, which Smith began to compose in 1977, without a final product in mind and only completed last month, is something less tangible, "the psychological impact the movement has on America and the world." Smith's project does come out of the tradition of free jazz instilled with distinctly African-American politics—on "Black Church," one of the last pieces he added to the composition, he noted, "the black church was at center of the Civil Rights Movement." But it also aims for something much broader than that. "It was not written just to explore the anger of the African-American experience," he said, "but to explore the American experience."
Having grown up in the Delta town of Leland, Mississippi, during segregation, Smith's suite is also of deeply personal significance. "My mother was the first person in my family to vote, along with my grandmother," he said. "These were big deals."
Ten Freedom Summers manages to pay tribute to the Civil Rights Movement in a wholly original, wordless way that also holds up as an astounding aesthetic achievement. His approach to the entire project, including the song titles, was poetic, he said: "And poetry, as you know, expresses a lot with a small number of words."
Photo by Scott Groller.
