![]() ![]() Did that experience inform your experience as a bandleader? You had considerable experience in your early career as a sideman. We know it from people like Scott Joplin, and on through Bessie Smith. Jazz infers a style, but creative music has a wider field and wider specification about it. We know their music got called jazz because they didn’t have the means to correct it. We see the jazz masters-the great and the lesser masters-as being the same as us they are not separate. Seeing the bigger picture opens your eyes to what is the truth.ĭo you think the term “creative music” conveys a wider or narrower sense of identity? I know that Lester Bowie saw the bigger picture as well. The only people who carried on calling it creature music were Anthony Braxton and I. ![]() So when people called it jazz, or colored music, they went along with it because they knew they had no power to change it. They knew they had no rights that the rest of the world would recognize. Back then, black musicians didn’t think about fighting for the name to call the music they made. It has been around for a long time, since the early days of Louis Armstrong, and it survived in the music of Frederick Henderson and Duke Ellington. You’ve been called a “free-form jazz” musician. In early 2017, Smith will head to Europe for a series of dates with pianist Vijay Iyer, with whom he collaborated on the recent album A Cosmic Rhythm With Each Stroke (ECM). Smith’s latest release is America’s National Parks (Cuneiform), a tribute to the natural landscapes of the United States and the ideals they represent. Now 74, he continues to educate, compose and perform, adopting a schedule that would exhaust musicians half his age. Smith has been a pioneering artist for well over 40 years. Trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith is a multi-award winning composer, performer and educator, shortlisted for the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Music for the four-disc set Ten Freedom Summers (Cuneiform). Wadada Leo Smith (Photo: Courtesy Cuneiform Records) ![]()
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