Wadada Leo Smith presents the European premiere of his phenomenal large-scale masterwork - the complete Ten Freedom Summers suite - More than seven hours of music spread over three nights at Cafe OTO, with his Golden Quartet, a string section and video artist Jesse Gilbert. Ten Freedom Summers is inspired by the story of the civil rights movement, capturing defining moments in the history of the USA from the Niagara Falls Congress in 1905 to Martin Luther King's Memphis speech.

"Hope, anger, abstraction and grand aesthetic ambition come to bear in Smith’s inspirational work, bolstered by the charge of the new." - Josef Woodard, LA Times (review of the Los Angeles premiere of Ten Freedom Summers)

WADADA LEO SMITH

Wadada Leo Smith has been active in the creative contemporary music world for over 30 years and in 2013 was one of the three Finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. A trumpet player, multi-instrumentalist, composer and improviser, his original theory of jazz and world music has been significant in his musical development as an artist and educator.

Born in Leland, Miss., Smith's early musical life began in high school concert and marching bands. At the age of 13, he became immersed in the Delta Blues and improvisational music traditions. As an improvisor-composer, Smith has studied a variety of music cultures (African, Japanese, Indonesian, European and American) and to fully express this music, he has developed an original theory and notation system for jazz and world music which he calls Ankhrasmation.



Some of the artists Smith has performed with are Muhal Richard Abrams, Anthony Braxton, Leroy Jenkins, Roscoe Mitchell, Lester Bowie, Richard Teitelbaum, Joseph Jarman, George Lewis, Cecil Taylor, Andrew Cyrill, Oliver Lake, Anthony Davis, Carla Bley, David Murray, Don Cherry, Jeanne Lee, Milton Campbell, Henry Brant, Richard Davis, Tadao Sawai, Ed Blackwell, Sabu Toyozumi, Peter Kowald, Kazuko Shiraishi, Han Bennink, Misja Mengelberg, Marion Brown, Kazutoki Umezu, Kosei Yamamoto, Charlie Haden, Kang Tae Hwan, Kim Dae Hwan and Tom Buckner, among many others.



GOLDEN QUARTET

Wadada Leo Smith / trumpet, flugelhorn

Anthony Davies / piano

As a composer, Davis is best known for his operas. X, The Life and Times of Malcolm X, which played to sold-out houses at its premiere at the New York City Opera in 1986, was the first of a new American genre: opera on a contemporary political subject. The recording of X was released on the Gramavision label in August 1992 and received a Grammy Nomination for "Best Contemporary Classical Composition" in February 1993. Davis's second opera, Under the Double Moon, a science fiction opera with an original libretto by Deborah Atherton, premiered at the Opera Theatre of St. Louis in June 1989. His third opera, Tania, with a libretto by Michael-John LaChiusa and based on the abduction of Patricia Hearst, premiered at the American Music Theater Festival in June 1992. A recording of Tania was released in 2001 on Koch, and in November 2003, Musikwerkstaat Wien presented its European premiere. A fourth opera, Amistad, about a shipboard uprising by slaves and their subsequent trial, premiered at the Lyric Opera of Chicago in November 1997. Set to a libretto by poet Thulani Davis, the librettist of X, Amistad was staged by George C. Wolfe.

Anthony Brown / drums

Anthony Brown's musical career, spanning performance, composition, and education, dates back to the 1970's. A San Francisco native of Japanese and African/Native American descent who grew up around the world as an "Army brat," Dr. Brown has developed a unique compositional and performance voice reflective of his own intercultural heritage and experiences. His work in the early 1980's with the pioneering San Francisco-based jazz quartet, United Front, sparked an interest in blending non-Western compositional approaches and instruments with traditional jazz idioms and improvisation that he is still exploring today. Jazz critic Neil Tesser wrote, "When it comes to integrating Asian musical traditions with jazz, no one has better credentials than percussionist and composer Anthony Brown. Brown even seems to have been born to the task ...". He has played with the likes of Max Roach, Cecil Taylor, Zakir Hussain as well as Wadada Leo Smith.

John Lindberg / bass

For the last thirty-seven years John Lindberg has traveled the globe performing thousands of concerts of creative music. He has released myriad albums that spotlight his original compositions and feature his singularly identifiable bass playing. His extended works for chamber ensembles, both large and small, have been widely commissioned, including works for The Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble, New York Chamber Ensemble, and Neues Kolner Streichquartett. His work as a producer of powerful cross-genre projects is well known, as is his ongoing work as an educator with a distinctly unique message. In addition to being an ensemble leader and a co-founder of the String Trio of New York, he has worked with a plethora of luminary improvising artists, including Albert Mangelsdorff, Ed Thigpen, Wadada Leo Smith, Susie Ibarra, Karl Berger, John Carter, Kevin Norton and Roswell Rudd.

JESSE GILBERT

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. Since 2010 he has developed and performed with SpectralGL, an interactive visual software instrument that generates real-time 3D animation in response to sound. Building on his background as a composer and technologist, Gilbert’s work probes the phenomenological nature of listening itself through the language of improvisation and collaborative dialogue. His creative work has been presented widely in the U.S. and abroad, and he has collaborated with a wide range of artists, including: Wadada Leo Smith, Anthony Braxton, Mark Trayle, Leroy Jenkins, Pauline Oliveros, Anne LeBaron, Nels Cline, Carole Kim, Motoko Honda, Timur Bekbosunov, Maile Colbert and many others. He is currently the Chair of the Department of Media Technology at Woodbury University in Los Angeles.



THE LIGETI QUARTET

Mandhira de Saram / violin 1
Patrick Dawkins / violin 2
Richard Jones / viola
Ben Davis / guest cellist

Formed in 2010, the Ligeti Quartet are quickly establishing themselves as leading exponents of contemporary music in the United Kingdom and abroad. They have gained a reputation for an innovative approach to works by established and emerging composers, through collaborations with performance artists, video artists, actors and DJs. Their playing has taken them across the globe with performances in Europe and a tour of China and Hong Kong. They are currently Featured Artists for Yorkshire Live Music Project and were selected as Park Lane Group Young Artists 2012-13, which recently presented the quartet to a full house at the Purcell Room. This year they were also selected as an associate ensemble of the European Chamber Music Academy. They will record for Signum Classics featuring a collection of new commissions for string quartet and trumpet, for release in 2014.

The quartet comprises graduates from the Royal Academy of Music, Royal College of Music and Oxford University. As an ensemble they have been coached by members of the Arditti, Bingham, Chilingirian and Kreutzer quartets and have performed for ChamberStudio masterclasses at Kings Place, London. In early 2012 the quartet took part in the Barbican's Kronos Lab, studying intensively with the Kronos Quartet during their UK tour. Their trial as associate ensemble at ECMA is funded by the Tillett Trust and the Musicians’ Benevolent fund.

Ben Davis is a London based improvising cellist. He has played with Oriole, Evan Parker, Ingrid Laubrock, Louis Moholo, Fumi Okiji, Polar Bear, Mary Halverson and Tom Rainey. In 2007 he launched his own group Basquiat Strings which released their 2nd album, Part 2, this year.




This engagement is supported by Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation through USArtists International in partnership with the National Endowment for the Arts and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.