Trumpet tunes

Wadada Leo Smith brings his jazz expertise to Buffalo

No argument here. Let’s cede right away the truth of what Anthony Davis once said about his Connecticut cohort, free jazz trumpet player and composer Wadada Leo Smith — that he is “one of the unsung heroes of American music.”

It’s time to sing about him. He is about to perform major music in Buffalo next week.

Smith will come here for a three-day residence culminating in a performance next Friday of a Smith magnum opus that is a major 2012 jazz event by any reckoning.

What Smith will be playing with a double quartet composed of his own Golden Quartet and the cream of Buffalo’s free jazz players is a selection from his cycle of 18 compositions called “Ten Freedom Summers,” a tribute to the American civil rights movement and some of its greatest figures, everyone from Dred Scott and Rosa Parks to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Thurgood Marshall.

Smith was born in Mississippi close to the Delta in 1941 and fatefully moved to Chicago just in time to be an integral part of the greatest avant-garde jazz organization in the music’s history, the AACM, the Association for the Advancement of Creative Music. The music he made then and later with Muhal Richard Abrams, Anthony Braxton and Leroy Jenkins continued the remarkable work first heard a decade earlier back east from Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor.

Smith moved eventually to Connecticut but has remained a member of the free jazz compositional and performing aristocracy, along with those musicians and Henry Threadgill, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, etc.

For the Buffalo performance of “Ten Freedom Summers,” his Golden Quartet will include pianist Angelica Sanchez, bassist John Lindberg and the legendry free jazz drummer Pheeroan Aklaff. Buffalo musicians augmenting that basic group will be cellist Jonathan Golove, guitarist Omar Tamez, drummer John Bacon and Hallwalls music programmer and saxophonist Steve Baczkowski.

Smith will hold workshops at 10 a.m. Wednesday and Thursday in the Buffalo Performing Arts Academy and Capen Hall at the University at Buffalo.•

http://www.buffalonews.com/entertainment/gusto/music/concert-previews/article746433.ece