{"id":5630,"date":"2016-02-08T20:37:35","date_gmt":"2016-02-08T20:37:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.artinfo.com\/blunotes\/?p=5630"},"modified":"2016-02-08T20:37:35","modified_gmt":"2016-02-08T20:37:35","slug":"entering-ahkreanvention-wadada-leo-smith-at-the-new-quorum-in-new-orleans","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/larryblumenfeld.com\/index.php\/2016\/02\/08\/entering-ahkreanvention-wadada-leo-smith-at-the-new-quorum-in-new-orleans\/","title":{"rendered":"Entering Ankhrasmation: Wadada Leo Smith at The New Quorum in New Orleans"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"photos<\/a>
Wadada Leo Smith leading a workshop performance at The New Quorum\/ cellist: Helen Gillet\/ photos by Larry Blumenfeld, using Jonathan Freilich’s excellent camera<\/figcaption><\/figure>
\nIn January, I got the chance to return to New Orleans for a focused period of writing and reflection, courtesy of The New Quorum<\/strong>, where I was writer-in-residence within an inaugural residency class. Having unpacked my clothes, I\u2019m now unpacking my notes, interviews and conversations. Here\u2019s the first of a series of posts drawn from that experience.<\/em>
\nThe New Quorum is <\/em>an\u00a0artist residency organization founded and directed by Gianna Chachere<\/strong>, and dedicated to bringing professional musicians and writers from across the globe to New Orleans for meaningful cultural exchange with local and regional artists.<\/em>
\nIf you\u2019re a musician or writer interested in such an opportunity, now\u2019s the time to go here<\/a>: Applications for Spring residencies (<\/em>May 16-June 13) are accepted through March 4.<\/em>
\nIf you\u2019d lend financial or volunteer support go here <\/a>now: This innovative program deserves such nurturing.<\/em>
\n 
\nThe night after I settled into my temporary and lovely home on Esplanade Avenue, the living room Christmas tree, which was still up, was dotted with sheet music. This was the first of four workshops for musicians led by composer and trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith<\/strong>, followed by an informal house concerts as part of his January residency.
\nSmith\u2019s music, which is both singular and part of an\u00a0influential movement connected to Chicago\u2019s Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), demands improvisatory spirit. And, well, those Christmas tree branches worked just fine as music stands.
\nThe music itself was anything but ornamental. Smith\u2019s work employs \u201crhythm units\u201d and is expressed on paper through \u201cAnkhrasmation.” Smith uses this\u00a0neologism\u2014formed of \u201cAnkh,\u201d the Egyptian symbol for life, \u201cRas,\u201d the Ethiopian word for leader, and \u201cMa\u201d, a universal term for mother\u00ad\u00ad\u2014to denote the\u00a0systemic musical language he\u00a0has developed over nearly 50 years\u00a0<\/span>for, he says, “scoring sound, rhythm and silence, or for scoring improvisation.”
\n\"wadada2\"<\/a>Here\u2019s the more detailed description, included on his website<\/a>:<\/p>\n

“Since 1971 I have been concerned with creating alternatives for a world music, one which utilizes the fundamental laws of improvisation and composition while retaining a uniqueness of its own. I began to design a notation system for scoring sound, rhythm and silence, or for scoring improvisation, a technique I term \u201cAnkhrasmation<\/span>.\u201d Ankhrasmation<\/span>\u00a0literally means to create and invent musical ideas simultaneously, utilizing the fundamental laws of improvisation and composition. Within this system, all of the elements of the scored music are controlled through symbols designating duration, improvisation, and moving sounds of different velocities.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

If that sounds clinical, it\u2019s distinctly not in practice.
\nThe \u00a0organic nature of Smith\u2019s music came across, gradually and then swiftly, to the dozen musicians assembled at The New Quorum house. Though Smith\u2019s scores have great allure as visual representation, \u201cthey\u2019re not \u2018graphic scores,\u2019 he\u2019s quick to point out\u2014they\u2019re \u2018language scores.\u2019\u201d
\nThe musicians gathered for Smith\u2019s workshops represented a wide range of musical interests and instruments. Guitarist and composer Jonathan Freilich<\/strong>, who recruited many of these musicians, had studied with Smith at the California Institute of the Arts. The rest lacked such intimate familiarity with Smith\u2019s ideas. Still, cellist Helen Gillet<\/strong>, trombonist Jeff Albert<\/strong> and others maintain at least one foot in what some call \u201cavant-garde\u201d or \u201cfree\u201d jazz but is more appropriately referred to by the term Smith prefers: \u201ccreative music.\u201d
\nAmong the first night\u2019s crew were two other New Quorum artists-in-residence. Flutist and composer Nicole Mitchell<\/strong>, who is now a professor at University of California Irvine, has strong musical roots in Chicago, where she once served as the AACM\u2019s president; her grasp of the context for Smith\u2019s music is by now intuitive. For, vocalist and composer Lisa E. Harris<\/strong>, who hails from Houston, Smith\u2019s specific methods formed \u201can entirely new frontier,\u201d she later told me; still, the ways in which Harris translates her own music through film and contemporary opera and her integration of artistry with natural sciences and social commentary form somewhat of an open door to the logic of Smith\u2019s work. Damon Locks<\/strong>, a Chicago-based visual artist, vocalist and musician, who was also in residence with us at The New Quorum, arrived a few days later; he brought along a bound copy of Smith\u2019s \u201cNotes (8 Pieces),\u201d a 1973 treatise.
\nAs Smith worked through his music to begin his initial workshop, he described the mutable flow of his pieces through possible \u201croutings,\u201d and discussed \u201cevents and decisions\u201d that \u201ccause the matrix to shift.\u201d He talked about how some critics and musicians, decades ago, related his ideas to the Minimalist movement. \u201cBut Minimalism had no sliding<\/em>,\u201d he said, elongating that word to a delicious extreme.
\n\u201cIt may feel like these are eighth notes,\u201d he told the musicians at one point. \u201cBut they\u2019re not. They exist in space, but not in fixed meter.\u201d Smith\u2019s approach to rhythm dispenses with metric equations, and rather deals with space in relative proportions to craft heightened moments of tension-and-release and to form phrases shaped more like the tumbling out of conversation or the manner in which early blues stepped freely across strict bar lines.
\nSmith mentioned that he likes to embed each piece with a signature. On that first night, it was the presence of a 64th<\/sup>\u2014an expansive harmonic idea (the number was also referred to rhythmically)\u2014as a marker in \u201cLyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society and The Civil Rights Act of 1964.\u201d That piece is part of Smith\u2019s \u201cTen Freedom Summers,\u201d the sprawling masterwork he premiered in Los Angeles in 2011, released in a 4-CD set the following year, and has been revising with additional material in performance ever since (Smith\u2019s music, like Ellington\u2019s, never stands still.)
\nAs I wrote in a Wall Street Journal review<\/a> in 2011:<\/p>\n

\u201cTen Freedom Summers\u201d is named for a 10-year stretch, from the landmark Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision declaring school segregation unconstitutional to the \u201cfreedom summer\u201d voter-registration drive and Civil Rights Act of 1964. It also traces Mr. Smith’s life as a composer through 34 years\u2014from 1977\u2019s \u201cMedgar Evers\u201d to his tribute to his John F. Kennedy, written in 2011\u2014to form a personal reflection on the legacy of the civil-rights movement from a musician, born in Leland, Miss., in 1941, who came of age as that history took shape.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

At the New Quorum house during that first workshop, soon it was time for chairs and table to get moved, and for an small audience to gather: musicians in one room; listeners in an adjoining room; gumbo and rice on the stove in the kitchen. This was a casual house concert as well as an experimental music workshop. It was also a gathering that harked back to the original Quorum, from which the present New Quorum drew its name.
\nThe Quorum, which took shape briefly from 1963-64 on Esplanade Avenue, not far from the house Chachere has established, was \u201ca haven for artists, writers, poets, musicians, scholars, university professors, actors that opened its doors to persons from all racial backgrounds when that was a controversial thing to do,\u201d said Roxy Wright<\/strong>, who was among its founding members. Wright, who was active in the Civil Right Movement and has served as an officer or board member with many leading New Orleans cultural organizations in the decades since, participated in a panel discussion with Smith and I, moderated by Chachere, at Tulane University. During a conversation billed as \u201cLooking Back, Moving Forward: Music and Advancing Cultural Equity,\u201d and presented by The New Quorum and Tulane\u2019s New Orleans Center for the Gulf South, Wright wondered aloud whether the forces that divide New Orleans along racial lines had really changed that much over the decades, and offered that hope that culture continued to provide one key to productive action.
\nThe legacy of New Orleans cultural traditions\u2014what to hold onto and why\u2014made for some tension during that discussion; most notably, Smith\u2019s feeling that in New Orleans, the reverence for tradition may contribute to a creative stalemate or a stifling environment. (That tension requires and deserves more focus, and I\u2019ll return to it in a future post.) Still, I was touched by Smith\u2019s reflections on the AACM\u2019s early days, in the context of the original Quorum and of his New Quorum workshops:
\n“The AACM, when I first went there, had poets and writers and dancers as well as musicians\u2014people who were exploring and demonstrating similar ideas. Our music practice is the one most closely related to democratic principles. In our ensembles, even though the composer composes the parameters of engagement in that performance, there\u2019d be a dialogue about how to do it. And anybody\u2019s influence would be part of how to do it.”
\n\"wadada2b\"<\/a>That\u2019s the way it played out in Smith\u2019s workshops, which continued for three more evenings, each of a different character and cast and feeling, and yet one consistent arc of engagement. By the final night\u2019s performance, Harris\u2019s vocals grew into unexpected mini-arias. Smith, who played increasingly in the final sessions, engaged in some startling explorations of texture and pattern through isolated duet and trio sections.
\nBefore the final performance, cellist Gillet, who had one such musical exchange, told me, \u201cWadada turns your concepts upside down and then tells you to fly the plane as usual\u2014improvising, using your skills, but just looking at everything upside down.\u00a0So everything will be wrong, and also right.\u201d Trombonist Albert said, \u201cWadada\u2019s ideas pushed us to deal with musical elements beyond pitches and rhythms and deal with ideas like densities, and velocities, and energy levels, things we sometimes talk about but don\u2019t always translate into performance.\u201d
\nSmith\u2019s presence in that house on Esplanade had a profound impact on me, and not just for my deepened understanding of the inspirations and inner workings of his music. It\u2019s hard to describe the ways in which accumulated wisdom, new ideas and unfettered attitude spill forth from Smith\u2014over eggs and grits at breakfast or while watching college basketball or through a focused interview (the latter of which I\u2019ll share in a later post).
\nDuring his stay at The New Quorum, Smith and I talked at length about what he hears as contrasting musical revolutions ignited by New Orleans icons\u2014one represented by Jelly Roll Morton, the other by King Oliver and, in its ultimate expression, Louis Armstrong. Smith got me to thinking anew about the current place of \u201ccreative music\u201d in New Orleans (truly an outsider subculture), and about the equation of tensions between art, commerce, tradition and modernity in a city that has, at least until now, never conformed to national conventions.
\nOne day before I left, Freilich drove me around town and shared both fond memories of his days playing at bars like Little People\u2019s Place and in a band led by trumpeter Kermit Ruffins. Like so many musicians I know in New Orleans, Freilich lamented a drying up of the venues and casual contexts that \u201cmade this city sound different than any other.\u201d
\nSmith and I have some points of disagreement about New Orleans traditional jazz culture. Where I see something functional and elemental to the daily lives of a population that refused to be driven out a decade ago, Smith sees, more often than not, an impediment to moving forward in terms of artistry itself as well as the commerce that supports such artistry. That\u2019s an unfair paraphrase in both his direction and mine; and yet my point is that I don\u2019t think either one of us is necessarily wrong.
\nOne thing Smith is right about, and that he declared quite clearly: It\u2019s up to musicians and to those who care about culture to think beyond repairing broken or failing environments; what is needed are new structures, fresh starts and independent approaches.
\nSmith\u2019s workshops were a tangible example of these ideas in terms of aesthetics. And The New Quorum announced its presence by making a structural contribution: These workshops were precisely the sorts of exchanges that should be going on, especially in New Orleans. The performances were a forceful addition to January\u2019s cultural calendar and distinct from any other offerings. And in New Orleans, such things happen best when literally connected to the city\u2019s history\u2014to, say, Roxy Wright\u2019s history\u2014and as offered up with clear focus as well as good food and true hospitality (and not the tourism sense of that word). I couldn\u2019t help but notice that Chachere\u2019s house had on its walls striking portrait photos of waiter and bellmen in New Orleans hotels\u2014figures who are invisible within and yet emblematic of the city and, worse, jobs that represent a trap against genuine opportunity in the name of a tourism economy. Too often, in a city known for culture, musicians are relegated to the role (and maybe even the mindset) of service employees. (I think, on some level, that\u2019s the trap Smith warned against when he bristled at blind reverence for tradition, even in a town where that can be heard as heresy.)
\nThe New Quorum residencies worked the way these things are supposed to work but don\u2019t always. It was homegrown but not confined, open but not rootless and, best of all, it took the shape and form of the way musicians naturally communicate.
\nI\u2019ll post again about Lisa E. Harris\u2019s original opera film, \u201cChildren of The Lost,\u201d
\n