Wadada Leo Smith

Born in Leland, Mississippi in 1941, Wadada Leo Smith has developed since the 1960s a body of work situated between avant-garde jazz, free improvisation and contemporary composition. His trumpet playing is marked by open phrasing, pronounced silences and a very free structural approach. After beginnings in rhythm-and-blues groups, he joined the AACM in Chicago in 1967 — a decisive context for his approach to 'creative music' — and co-founded the Creative Construction Company with Leroy Jenkins and Anthony Braxton. In the 1970s he launched the Kabell label, studied ethnomusicology at Wesleyan University and devised his own notation system, Ankhrasmation. His discography as a leader spans formats from solo to large ensembles, with milestones such as Divine Love (1979), Kulture Jazz (1993), the Golden Quartet from 2000, and Ten Freedom Summers (2012), which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Music in 2013. He has also developed projects with Henry Kaiser around Miles Davis's electric repertoire and collaborated with Anthony Davis, Jack DeJohnette, John Zorn, Vijay Iyer and Andrew Cyrille. A long-time instructor at the California Institute of the Arts, Wadada Leo Smith continues a career in which improvisation, composition and reflection on American history regularly intersect.