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Trumpeter/composer Wadada Leo Smith’s Ten Freedom Summers is the work of a lifetime by one of jazz’s true visionaries, a kaleidoscopic, spiritually charged opus inspired by the struggle for African-American freedom and equality before the law. Triumphant and mournful, visceral and philosophical, searching, scathing and relentlessly humane, Smith’s music embraces the turbulent era’s milestones while celebrating the civil rights movement’s heroes and martyrs. This four-disc set documents a stunning, career-capping accomplishment by a jazz giant in the midst of an astonishing creative surge. http://www.cuneiformrecords.com/bandshtml/smith.html
Trumpeter and composer Wadada Leo Smith's Ten Freedom Summers is four and a half hours of music, spread over four compact discs. The mind struggles to make coherent sense of so large an undertaking. Smith has said that there are no recurring musical motifs; the nineteen pieces—most of them fully-developed suites in their own right, three of them stretching over twenty minutes—stand on their own. Two groups—Smith's two-drummer Golden Quintet and the nine-piece ensemble Southwest Chamber Music led by Jeff von der Schmidt—perform, sometimes separately, sometimes together. Even by the standards of Smith's own heterogeneous and energetic creativity, it's in a class by itself....http://www.allaboutjazz.com/php/article.php?id=42296
