Wadada Leo Smith at Arts and Letters Saturday September 28, 2024
The newly reopened American Academy of Arts and Letters in New York City hosted it’s first concert, the Redkoral Quartet performing string quartets by Wadada Leo Smith and Raven Chacon. This performance was in conjunction with Raven Chacon’s Aviary, a sound installation that opened at Arts and Letters along with a gallery show of Smith’s visual scores.
The performance of Smith’s String Quartet No. 17 (2022-2023) was an absolute triumph and displayed Smith as perhaps the pre-eminent contemporary composer of the string quartet. He is certainly one of the most prolific as well, having reached 17 over the last 40-50 years of Smith’s compositional life. The string writing veered from glissandos to cycled passages to short, staccato chords, reaching apexes of beauty like in the second movement, subtitled “The Lincoln Memorial.” That title could allude to Copland’s Lincoln Portrait and there certainly was a Copland-esque Americana to the sound world. But the work never became cloying, or even very close. Smith’s ability to constantly re-direct to different places made the work ever fascinating.
That each movement had it’s own subtitles including “The Capital and the Rotunda,” “The USA Supreme Court, Can It Survive,” and “Washington, D.C., January Six: The Falcon Uplifted the Unity with Love” attests to Smith continuing to think and critique the American project. His late masterworks 10 Freedom Summers, and America’s National Parks both included Smith’s long form questioning of Civil Rights, where we are now in the nations racial history, and the idea of who owns the national parks. That Smith is able to place so much into an seemingly abstract music is revelatory.
The concert ended with a short, improvised set of Smith on trumpet and Chacon on processed guitar in the North Gallery of the Arts and Letters campus. With Chacon providing a bed of soft, slightly shifting, electronic chords, Smith, with his trumpet muted, performed an exquisite, plaintive, melodic coda to the afternoon’s performance. Sublime.
