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| Sept. 28 – Wadada Leo Smith Concert + ongoing Ankhrasmation art-score exhibit at American Academy of Arts and Letters Visionary trumpeter/composer and musical pioneer Wadada Leo Smith will present more than a half century of his Ankhrasmation art-scores at the American Academy of Arts and Letters in New York City. The exhibition, entitled Kosmic Music, will run from September 26, 2024 to July 3, 2025 in conjunction with Aviary, a site-specific piece by the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer and artist Raven Chacon, a former student of Smith's at CalArts. The exhibit takes place at the Academy's Audubon Terrace, Broadway between West 155 and 156 Streets New York City. The opening of the exhibitions will be celebrated on Saturday, September 28 with a special performance by the RedKoral Quartet featuring violinists Shalini Vijayan and Mona Tian, violist Andrew McIntosh and cellist Ashley Walters. The ensemble will perform Wadada's String Quartet No. 17, subtitled The Capital, Washington DC: An American Experiment with Democracy and Capitalism, for the first time in its complete string quartet iteration. The program will also feature two works by Raven Chacon – Journey of the Horizontal People, 2016 and Double Weaving, 2018 – and will culminate in a duo performance by the two composers. This concert will take place at 4 p.m. Wadada Leo Smith, Jupiter in Black Space, 2020, from The Three Jupiters, 2020–23. Wadada Leo Smith Smith considers the Ankhrasmation symbolic music language to be a discovery from inspiration that he realized in 1967, the fruit of a search he'd begun three years earlier. He's spent the ensuing 50-plus years researching, developing and learning how to create music from the language. Its symbolic nature allows each performer the opportunity and responsibility to discover and develop their own relationship to the language and the art that they use to create the music. Each artist's methodology is personal to their own practice and never shared with their fellow musicians. Each performer's research as to how they use the art-score's properties to create music is what makes their contribution unique allowing for, as Wadada says, "a pure and unique performance, where multiple sources are generated from a single symbol, color, shape or line by the artists." The name combines the inspiration of "Ankh, " the Egyptian symbol for life; "Ras, " the Ethiopian word for leader; and "Ma", a universal term for mother; its roots are in the ancient and the universal. "What makes an Ankhrasmation art-score different from any other kind of art- or music-making practice, " Smith explains, is that "its complete realization is achieved when it is both seen in an exhibition as visual art and also heard in a performance as music. Both of them equally share this space of creativity that I have constructed, and both should be enjoyed, simultaneously or at different times." Kosmic Music represent more than five decades of Smith's work. The exhibition features career-spanning art-scores from five series: "Music of the Spheres" (inspired by Charles Ives' unfinished Universe Symphony); "Sonic and Rhythmic Particles" (inspired by Einstein's theories), "Jupiter, Jupiter in Black Space and Jupiter in Silver Space, " "Four Earth Ages" (ranging from the Ice Age to the "danger zone" of the Nuclear Age); and "Four Symphonies" along with four books of Wadada's "Image-Poems" connected to the Four Symphonies. The art-scores are bold and evocative in their own right: vivid colors swirl in graceful shapes; geometric figures orbit one another or assemble into multi-hued towers; planets and satellites suggest cosmic tones; abstract symbols hint at ancient runes or maps to the unknown. String Quartet No. 17, which will be performed by RedKora' Quartet on September 28, incorporates the "Jupiter in Silver Space " art-score. Wadada Leo Smith Composer, trumpeter and author Wadada Leo Smith is one of the creative music world's most heralded artists. Born December 18, 1941 in Leland, MS, he grew up steeped in the musical traditions of the South performing in Delta Blues and other traditional bands, eventually moving to Chicago where he joined the legendary AACM collective. Smith defines his music as "Creative Music, " and his diverse discography reveals a recorded history of music centered in the idea of spiritual harmony and the unification of social and cultural issues of his world. Among his major recordings are Ten Freedom Summers, America's National Parks and String Quartets Nos. 1-12. A finalist for the 2013 Pulitzer Prize in Music, Smith has received numerous other awards and honors including a 2016 Doris Duke Artist Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Hammer Museum's 2016 Mohn Award for Career Achievement "honoring brilliance and resilience, " the UCLA Medal, the University's highest honor, and the 2022 Vision Festival's Lifetime Achievement Award, among many others. He was selected as a 2021 United States Artists' USA Fellow and named a 2022 Mellon Arts & Practitioner Fellow at the Yale Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity and Transnational Migration. In 2023 he was selected for induction into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. An esteemed educator, from 1994–2013 Smith was on the faculty at The Herb Alpert School of Music at California Institute of the Arts, where he served as director of the African-American Improvisational Music program. He continues to give workshops and master classes worldwide and most recently served as the Spring 2024 Fromm Foundation Visiting Lecturer on Music at Harvard University. Wadada Leo Smith – Kosmic Music September 26, 2024-July 3, 2025 American Academy of Arts and Letters Audubon Terrace, New York NY 10032 Opening performance Saturday, September 28 at 4 p.m. write your comments about the article :: © 2024 Jazz News :: home page |