The Beautiful Moment

Wadada Leo Smith plays the trumpet with a brilliant, forceful sound and has been a major creative figure in jazz for over 50 years.

This century, his importance and prominence as a composer have grown. His beautiful and moving large-scale piece, “Ten Freedom Summers,” made him a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Music in 2013, and he’s continued his musical investigation of America with “The Great Lakes Suites” and “America’s National Parks.” This summer, his label Tum released a seven CD set of his 12 String Quartets, played by the RedKoral Quartet, joined on various pieces by additional musicians like Smith himself, harpist Alison Bjorkedal, pianist Anthony Davis, and baritone Thomas Buckner.

The immediate sound of Smith’s playing and the music he gives to others may seem far apart, but there is a long-line way of thinking that runs through all his music making: When it comes out of his trumpet it sounds like improvisation in a jazz idiom; when it comes from a string quartet, it sounds like post-World War II expressionism. But as he makes clear in a recent interview over Zoom, the common understandings of both improvisation and composition are things he left behind years ago.