Wadada Leo Smith - uncut

Phil Freeman: How did you first meet Anthony Braxton, and how did you start working with him?

Wadada Leo Smith: I met him in Chicago. I had been referred to him by another fellow I met in the Army, I guess when they were stationed in Korea or something. I had a phone number, and when I got to Chicago I looked Braxton up and we started immediately making a connection.

What was the common ground, do you think?

The fact that we were both in the AACM, and we were both looking at ways at that time of how to get our music out, because this was 1967 and very little had happened at that time. We had yet to do 3 Compositions of New Jazz; that was later in the year. It was a mutual situation where I understood things he was looking for and he checked out some of the things I was looking for.

I don’t think – I know I wasn’t thinking stylistically at all about any of these kinds of music. When I came to Chicago I had already composed a pretty good body of work and already begun to understand music without metrical progression or modulation. And I was never, ever working in a harmonic sphere where harmonic progression was important. And you look at Braxton, he’s working just the opposite, he was looking at how you make creative music with those connections. And I was not so much interested in that part of it as a way of making music. I always looked at how you make music without all those things everybody has inherited.

A lot of AACM work seems to utilize space and silence more than the aggressive free jazz that came from New York. Can you talk about that?

The piece with the vocals on it and also ‘The Bell,’ those two have the most space. I would say that space was a very important component, still is. Most people have kind of crowded their musical contribution into narrow spaces, but space is still a very important component of my music and a lot of the AACM people. And by space we don’t mean just horizontal space, we’re talking about vertical space and lateral space.

Could you explain that in a little more detail?

Okay, vertical space has to do with the relationship between low and high notes. Not necessarily anything to do with chords, but the intervallic range. And horizontal of course is about linear form, going from section A to section B or from one type of movement to another type of movement. But the lateral one has to do with how you make music that suggests you’re moving upward but also moving forward. That’s the lateral one. That’s a great illusion, just like those illusionists who make you think they’ve vanished into space. They don’t really vanish into space, but the way they’ve concocted the illusion they convince you they’ve vanished. Lateral space does the same thing. At the same time it gives a forward trajectory and an upward one, and if you’re coming from the other direction, a backward trajectory and a downward one. But the most important thing is not necessarily the direction but what happens inside that direction. Most of the music coming out of the evolution of the ’60s into what we have now – every performer or instrumentalist has a responsibility to contribute to that space in both positive and negative ways, and by negative I mean by applying not necessarily the activity of his music but by utilizing silence. Because up until the early ’60s, before the evolution came in, most people were looking at how you make a version of music that has something to do with playing and how you make your contribution within the context of a solo. That’s not a multi-dominant music, that’s music where one line is dominant and every other line is subservient to it or at least plays a role that doesn’t eclipse or intercede against that solo line. It’s important to talk about how one utilizes the form.

The AACM artists seem to have released a lot of solo horn albums – was that something you all discussed as important, and what do you see as the importance of solo releases?

To make solo music, the tradition goes way back. It doesn’t start with us. Before we did it, Monk did a lot of solo music, and James P. Johnson all those piano players. But with the advent of wind instruments…The incentive is this. It’s almost impossible to think about being a complete artist without having this capability of performing solo, in ensemble, and orchestral formations. But the real incentive is that you learn a lot about yourself when you play solo music. And it, by the way, it’s not absent of anything. Solo means just what it says, alone. And usually people say they’ll imagine what the bass would be doing while you’re soloing, and I’m quick to tell them that they were somewhere else. They were not at that performance. Because focusing on a solo requires the same kind of energy as focusing on an ensemble. It’s just that the ensemble gives you a multiplicity of things to look at, while a solo gives you this intense involvement that amounts to the same thing. I’ll give you an example. Five you listen to an ensemble and focus on one instrument from top to bottom of the piece, whether it’s three minutes or five minutes. It’s very difficult. One would find it difficult, because the solo presents the same kind of awareness that the ensemble asks you for.

It can be just as difficult to follow a solo performance as a group performance, but don’t the additional instruments provide a larger context for what the soloist is doing?

It does provide a larger context. But following a solo is just as difficult as following a single instrument within an ensemble. The effort that it requires – it requires a constant focus, whereas with an ensemble you can drift back and forth and go over here and go over there and hear the whole thing. So the solo requires more effort, or just as much effort.

Playing in an ensemble you have this unit [and] you’re only responsible for a portion of the music. Even if you are the ensemble leader or director, you’re still only responsible for a portion of the music as it is being performed. Whereas if you’re a solo, you’re responsible for all of it. So it’s a very different kind of responsility, the burden of putting it out is much larger than playing within an ensemble. There’s very few people that have put out solo records. There have been economically, but I’m talking about within the context of highly developed solo music. I’m not talking about the average guy who gets out of high school or college and feels that he wants to present a solo CD, because he don’t have the money to hire somebody. Playing solo has nothing to do with economical possibilities, it has to do with the material, and what the artists wants to reveal.

In the early ’70s, you started the Kabell label to release your own work – why did you make that move?

Well, essentially the main reason was to try and control the output that I was doing. The other reason was to mark the different types of research I was going through and the way that was being developed. I wanted to document those areas I was exploring at that time. The documentation was a very important part of it. It wasn’t to make money or something like that, although that’s not an impossibility, because money could be made on records at that time.

So the business aspect wasn’t really a big part of your thinking?

I don’t think it plays any part, because for example I could not compete with large record companies. You cannot compete with newspapers and magazines and things like that. But what the artist does is they are able to present their music and make evidence of their own existence on the planet, and that’s a much higher calling than the economic. To me that’s the most important part of it, that you leave a legacy of information whether the times are right for that information or individuals are interested in that information. Some day they will be. And we know that because we can look back through history and find many, many examples of this type of new information that was put down a long time ago and they didn’t have the courage to look at it. Whatever you do, it means something. The Prophet Muhammad said that if all of creation was going to end in a few seconds, if you have a chance, plant a tree.

The writer Isaac Asimov said if he knew he had only a few minutes to live, he would type faster.

Exactly. You don’t stop typing, you work and when the planet goes away you go away with it.

How did the Creative Construction Company arise out of your work with Braxton and Leroy Jenkins?

That group came together out of a concert that was being presented in New York. Braxton and Jenkins and myself had just come back from Europe and someone was trying to present us in New York. That group came together to play that event and wound up playing three events all together, two in New York and one in Boston. That was it. Some groups have the potential of lasting longer and others don’t. I can say this – rarely, if you look at history, do collectives last long. They last for a brief moment. There are of course exceptions like the Modern Jazz Quartet and the Art Ensemble, but there’s not a ton of them.

How did the New Dalta Akhri group form, and why were there relatively few records by the group?

We made Reflectativity and we made Song of Humanity and we made Spirit Catcher and Divine Love and what else. That’s probably the apex of that band. We made a number of documents under the name New Dalta Akrhi or just under the name Leo Smith, but it was the same concept. The concept of that group was to begin to understand the rhythm music concept, which later became part of the Ankhrasmation system. That band quite frankly was the first band that began to introduce a clear idea about systemic music coming from my point of view. It was primarily involved in understanding how to use systems in making music, and it had a pretty good format, but we rehearsed every week, looked at a lot of music. Some of it was performed, some was just rehearsed. One might say that New Dalta Akhri was the first laboratory for what I was looking at for musical languages.