Wadada Leo Smith: “Rosa Parks: Pure Love. An Oratorio of Seven Songs”
This Video Viewing Room features a performance recording of Wadada Leo Smith, Rosa Parks: Pure Love. An Oratorio of Seven Songs (2019), along with a composer’s note and still images.
Rosa Parks: Pure Love. An Oratorio of Seven Songs, April 28, 2019 at The Kitchen. Videography by Joseph Bacon
Rosa Parks: Pure Love. was presented at The Kitchen from April 26–28, 2019. Wadada Leo Smith performed along with Diamond Voices, a trio including Karen Parks (vocals), Min Xiao-Fen (vocals and pipa), and Carmina Escobar (vocals); the RedKoral Quartet, including Shalini Vijayan (violin), Mona Tian (violin), Andrew McIntosh (viola), and Ashley Walters (cello); the Blue Trumpet Quartet, including Smith (trumpet), Ted Daniel (trumpet), Taylor Ho Bynum (cornet), and James Zollar (trumpet); and the Janus Duo, featuring Pheeroan akLaff (drums) and Hardedge (electronics). The performance also included video in live performance by Jesse Gilbert and butoh dance by Oguri.
To view the full program for this performance, click here.
COMPOSER’S NOTE
Rosa Parks: Pure Love employs the song-form as composition to convey a philosophical and spiritual narrative about my vision of Rosa Parks. The oratorio is concerned with ideas and my meditation on the Civil Rights movement, and, through lighting, photographs, and video images, reconnecting history in the present.
Embedded in the oratorio are excerpts of music by and performed by Anthony Braxton, Leroy Jenkins, Steve McCall, and myself. These excerpts are used as signatures inside of the oratorio. With respect for them I have embedded snapshots of their work.
In the last few years, I have used the word “create” to best describe what I and my colleagues are doing when we make music in the present moment. The so-called “improvisation” is a term that does not express accurately what we are doing. We are musical creators and that activity in the present moment is a creation. That is very much true of the performances captured on this recording of Rosa Parks: Pure Love.
— Wadada Leo Smith, 2019
Wadada Leo Smith, trumpeter, multi-instrumentalist, composer, and improviser, is one of the most acclaimed creative artists of his time, both for his music and his writings. For the last five decades, Smith has been a member of the historical and legendary Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM). He has been on the faculty of the following institutions: The University of New Haven (1975–1976), The Creative Music Studio in Woodstock, NY (1975–1978), and Bard College (1987–1993). From 1994–2013 he served as faculty at The Herb Alpert School of Music at California Institute of the Arts where he was the director of the African-American Improvisational Music program. Smith’s awards and commissions include DownBeat Magazine’s 65th Annual Critics Poll: Artist, Trumpet, and Album of the Year (America’s National Parks). A finalist for the 2013 Pulitzer Prize in Music, he received the 2016 Doris Duke Artist Award and earned an honorary doctorate from CalArts, where he was also celebrated as Faculty Emeritus. Smith’s own music theory and notational system for improvisation in an ensemble context, which he calls “ankhrasmation,” has been significant in his development as an artist and educator. Smith published his music philosophy in the early 1970s in notes (8 pieces), source a new world music: creative music (Kiom Press, 1973).
Diamond Voices:
Carmina Escobar is an experimental vocalist, creative performer, interpreter of contemporary music, improviser, and sound and intermedia artist, who currently lives in Los Angeles. Her work focuses primarily on sound, the voice, the body, and their interrelations to physical, social, and memory spaces.
Karen Parks is principally known for her work as an opera singer, having performed with major opera houses and symphony orchestras throughout Europe and the United States. However, she is equally at home with gospel, popular music, and jazz.
Min Xiao-Fen has become internationally known for her virtuosity and fluid playing style on the pipa, whether performing classical music or in an avant-garde or improvised setting, and has been featured as a pipa soloist in a number of symphony orchestras and chamber music ensembles. Xiao-Fen is also known as a singer and a composer.
RedKoral Quartet:
Originating during Smith’s tenure at CalArts in 1994–2013, all but one member of the RedKoral Quartet were his colleagues or students. The quartet participated in the recording of Smith’s Ten Freedom Summers (2011) and has since been an integral part of live performances of this major work. RedKoral Quartet has also performed several of Smith’s string quartets and has worked on recordings of them.
Andrew McIntosh is an internationally recognized composer and performer who teaches at CalArts and is a co-founder of the experimentally-minded Formalist Quartet.
Mona Tian has served for the last few years as a violinist in the orchestras of two Southern California-based opera houses—The Industry LA and Opera Santa Barbara—in addition to working with the Debut Chamber Orchestra organized by the community organization Young Musicians Foundation.
Shalini Vijayan is a well-established performer both on the East and the West Coast of the United States. As a member of New World Symphony in Miami, Florida in 1998–2001, she served as a concertmaster for many leading conductors.
Ashley Walters maintains a uniquely diverse career, performing music that blurs the boundaries between classical, avant-garde, and jazz, breaking new ground in repertoire with microtonality, extended techniques, alternative tunings, and improvisation.
Blue Trumpet Quartet:
In addition to Smith himself, BlueTrumpet Quartet includes three highly acclaimed trumpet players from different generations of creative musicians.
Ted Daniel began studying trumpet in elementary school and began his professional career playing local gigs with his childhood friend, the legendary guitarist Sonny Sharrock. Since then, Daniel has participated in over thirty published recordings with a range of great artists.
Taylor Ho Bynum has spent his career navigating the intersections between structure and improvisation–through musical composition, performance and interdisciplinary collaboration, and through production, organizing, teaching, writing, and advocacy.
James Zollar has played in various radio and jazz bands, and has directed his own quintet. Zollar attended San Diego City College and the University of California at San Diego, and also has studied with Woody Shaw in 1972, worked with Jon Faddis and the Carnegie Hall Jazz Orchestra, and played with Wynton Marsalis and The Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra.
Janus Duo:
Hardedge is the pseudonym of Velibor Pedevski for his experimental electronics projects based in New York. Hardedge’s experimental approach to sound, space, and structure is inspired and based on the fundamental principles of the AACM’s creative thinkers, with whom Pedevski has collaborated extensively for many years.
Pheeroan akLaff grew up in a musical family in Detroit, Michigan. In l975, akLaff moved to New Haven where he began performing with Wadada Leo Smith and many of the other young musicians based there.
Jesse Gilbert is an interdisciplinary artist working at the intersection of visual art, sound, and software design, creating flexible frameworks that are activated in live performance via network interaction or in installation settings.
Naoyuki Oguri who performs as simply Oguri, is a dancer and choreographer who lives in Los Angeles, California, where he creates and teaches dance. His work is influenced by the tradition of the Japanese Butoh style of dance. Prior to moving to Los Angeles he studied with master Tatsumi Hijikata, the founder of a genre of Butoh dance.
Images: 1) Wadada Leo Smith, Rosa Parks. An Oratorio of Seven Songs, 2019. Performance view, The Kitchen. ©Paula Court. 2) Still from Wadada Leo Smith, Rosa Parks: Pure Love. An Oratorio of Seven Songs, April 28, 2019 at The Kitchen. Videography by Joseph Bacon.