Wadada Leo Smith Premieres Revolutionary Fire-Love: a Sonic Odyssey in Search of Democracy and Humanity’s Rights

The Department of Music at Harvard University celebrates the work of trumpeter/composer and musical pioneer Wadada Leo Smith on Saturday, April 20, 2024 with the world premiere of two expansive new multi-movement pieces that confront the crisis facing democracy in America today. Titled Revolutionary Fire-Love: A Sonic Odyssey in Search of Democracy, the concert includes wide-ranging compositions which express Smith’s belief in the transformative power of love and community.

“Anything that fire touches, it transforms,” Smith explains. “The title is a reflection that focuses on what I think about when I observe humanity’s crisis. Revolutionary Fire-Love is a type of love that’s extremely hot and conducive to transformation.”

The event takes place in Harvard’s Paine Hall, 3 Oxford Street, Cambridge. It begins at 7 p.m. with a pre-concert conversation and Q&A with Wadada Leo Smith, Vijay Iyer and Yosvany Terry. It is free and open to the public, but tickets are required. Click here for tickets and information.

One of the creative music world’s most heralded artists, Smith is a Pulitzer Prize finalist and a 2023 inductee into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. This performance is part of Smith’s current appointment at Harvard University as the Spring 2024 Fromm Foundation Visiting Lecturer on Music. In addition to Smith’s graduate seminar on “Creativity, Inspiration and the Practice of Composition,” this concert will provide an opportunity for music department faculty and one of its graduate students to collaborate and perform with Smith. This concert is supported in part by the Fromm Music Foundation, and pays tribute to Wadada Leo Smith and his vital contributions to the field of contemporary music.

The evening opens with the FLUX Quartet, hailed by the San Francisco Chronicle as, “one of the most fearless and important new-music ensembles around,” performing the world premiere of Smith’s String Quartet, No. 17, subtitled The Capital, Washington DC: An American Experiment with Democracy and Capitalism. Each of the quartet’s five movements is inspired by a monument or event located in the country’s capital city.

Movement 1, “The Capitol and the Rotunda,” is dedicated to President Lincoln completing the construction of the Capitol Building’s rotunda in the midst of the Civil War, a symbol of longevity at a moment when the country’s future was threatened. “The Lincoln Memorial” looks at the monument where “activists and people of consciousness” have gathered to resolve issues – Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech being one notable example. “The US Supreme Court, Can It Survive?” poses a pertinent question, while “Freedom Plaza – Palestine Plaza” is an ode to another site traditionally used for the exercise of our right to peaceful protest. Finally, “January Six: The Falcon Uplifted the Unity with Love” deals not with that now-infamous day’s uprising, but the spiritual unity that allowed the insurrection to be overcome.

The evening’s second premiere is the composition, “Gardens of Peace: A Sonic Meditation for Peaceful and Nonviolence Acts Toward a Resolution-Accord,” penned for a stellar ensemble featuring trumpeter Smith with pianist Vijay Iyer, saxophonist Yosvany Terry, drummer Andrew Cyrille and electronic musicians Yvette Janine Jackson and Seiyoung Jang. Smith describes the piece as, “a meditation about how we can find space to resolve our issues without violence. The human problem is that nearly all of our recorded history shows that we are tempted to resolve allissues through violence.”

“Gardens of Peace” is meant to evoke an imaginary space, and the performance will feature a light installation. “I wanted to represent the Gardens of Peace in a translucent way,” Smith says, “so when one walks through it there’s no resistance, nothing that hinders the motion towards peace.”

Revolutionary Fire-Love is a work that urges change, but change through actions and love. “Change cannot come because we wish it to come,” Smith concludes. “Change has to come when people begin to learn how to think and make choices for themselves.”

Wadada Leo Smith
Composer, trumpeter and author Wadada Leo Smith is one of the creative music world’s most heralded artists. Born December 18, 1941 in Leland, MS, he grew up steeped in the musical traditions of the South performing in Delta Blues and other traditional bands, eventually moving to Chicago where he joined the legendary AACM collective. Smith defines his music as “Creative Music,” and his diverse discography reveals a recorded history of music centered in the idea of spiritual harmony and the unification of social and cultural issues of his world. Among his major recordings are Ten Freedom Summers, America’s National Parks and String Quartets Nos. 1-12.

A finalist for the 2013 Pulitzer Prize in Music for Ten Freedom Summers, Smith has received numerous other awards and honors including a 2016 Doris Duke Artist Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Hammer Museum’s 2016 Mohn Award for Career Achievement “honoring brilliance and resilience,” the UCLA Medal, the University’s highest honor, and the 2022 Vision Festival’s Lifetime Achievement Award, among many others. He was selected as a 2021 United States Artists’ USA Fellow and has also been named a 2022 Mellon Arts & Practitioner Fellow at the Yale Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity and Transnational Migration. In 2023 he was selected for induction into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. https://artsandletters.org/

Smith has earned the #1 spot in DownBeat Magazine’s International Critics Poll as Composer of the Year, Jazz Artist and Trumpeter of the Year, and the Jazz Journalists Association has honored Smith as their Musician of the Year, Composer of the Year and Trumpeter of the Year, as well as Duo of the Year for his work with Vijay Iyer.

Smith is the creator of Ankhrasmation, a symbolic image-based language for performers or musicians which has played a significant role in his development as an artist, ensemble leader and educator. His Ankhrasmation language scores have been exhibited in major American museums including The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, the Hammer Museum and the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts. His compositions have been performed by contemporary music ensembles worldwide. For over two decades he has been creating music for multiple ensembles, including works that take several days to perform.

An esteemed educator, from 1994–2013 Smith was on the faculty at The Herb Alpert School of Music at California Institute of the Arts, where he served as director of the African-American Improvisational Music program. He continues to give workshops and masterclasses worldwide and is currently serving as the Spring 2024 Fromm Foundation Visiting Lecturer on Music at Harvard University.

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