In this cross-generational video interview, trumpeter/composer Wadada Leo Smith joins musician/curator Taja Cheek backstage at the Walker’s McGuire Theater on March 30, 2019. Later that evening, Smith would perform America’s National Parks, his expansive, politically charged suite that explores and questions the luminous majesty, cultural histories, and violent realities of our natural areas. Their engaging conversation focuses on Smith’s musical trajectory, philosophy, and legacy, ranging from stories of his childhood to current projects, inspirations, and insights.
Taja Cheek (TC)
My name is Taja Cheek and I’m here with the legendary Wadada Leo Smith. Such a pleasure to meet you.
Wadada Leo Smith (WLS):
My pleasure to be here. Looking forward to our journey.
TC
Yes, so it’s difficult to have a conversation about you and your music without using the “J-word.”
WLS
Right.
TC
Can you speak a little bit about your resistance to jazz as a word, and if there are any other descriptors that you resist or embrace, such as avant-garde or classical music or other things like that?
WLS
Yeah, I’ll get the big word out first. I reject all titles, no matter what they are, because behind the titles are the real thing. For example, the word avant-garde means something about being advanced or ahead, and the truth is that it’s music that we’re looking at. And the word jazz, I don’t believe that there’s any recorded evidence anywhere that says a “jazz musician,” call it that name or call that really jazz. But also it has something to do with the possibility of being able to name what you do. I’ll give an example. For years, the AACM, the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, and I have been calling this music creative music and nobody believes it.
And the reason they don’t believe it is because in America, actually the world, the notion of power is based around the idea of limiting. And so when an African American says that this is creative music, they say, “Well, the AACM prefers to call their jazz ‘creative music.’” But it’s not jazz they’re talking about, they’re talking about creative music.
And it’s not an either/or or a preferable term. The term itself has so many problems, you see. It represents an isolation from the mainstream of performers, for one thing. And if a person decides that they’re doing something, and they’re the only authority on it, and they say it’s called creative music or it’s called Ankhrasmation, then they have to accept that. So I’m not resistant, I’ve actually divorced myself from that community. I’ve divorced myself from that philosophy. And I know for a fact if you read a book called, it’s a short little biography on Baby Dodds [The Baby Dodds Story: As Told to Larry Gara (1959)], and Baby Dodds refers to the music as being “creative music.” And that’s going back to Louis Armstrong.
TC
I wanted to actually ask you about when you were choosing the trumpet. You didn’t actually choose the trumpet, that you were hoping to play the drums.
WLS
Right.
TC
Can you talk a little bit about what kept you playing the trumpet?
WLS
Well, Oneal Jones was my first music teacher. And when I got to the door when they were handing out instruments that day, they gave me a mellophone. And a mellophone’s not a French horn. It’s just a peck horn. It’s bop and bop and bop. And I wasn’t happy with that instrument because it’s kind of round and awkward shaped, and it doesn’t have that classic feeling that I would want in my hand. But because I got it and I wanted to play music, I tried to do something with it.
And one day, Mr. Jones had come into my room, he had just come from Henry’s room. He really was kind of firing angry. And he comes into my room and I start and he said, “Stop.” And I stopped and he said, “Put the horn down.” I put it down. He said, “Go over there and tell Henry to come over here and you stay over there.” And that’s how I got the trumpet. Because Henry was playing the trumpet, okay? When Henry and I became the two best musicians in that school band.
So that’s how I got it. So I got it by default. I didn’t select it; it was given to me or selected for me. But then the second week of playing the trumpet, a salesman come into school to sell trumpets. And he had took out his trumpet to demonstrate what the trumpet could do, okay? And then he asked me to demonstrate what the trumpet could do and I did. And when I did, he closed his trumpet case up and he left, okay?
Because from the very beginning of the first two weeks, I could play the trumpet without this other information that we had. And he was saying how difficult it was to hit a high G and a high C, and I did that without any problem. And that has happened a couple times in my life. I’ve had lessons with a guy that was supposed to be a great teacher and the moment he started giving me a lesson and he asked me to play, he kept eating his alcohol candy and he left.
And I’m not saying that … I’m just giving the idea about what actually happens when you’re in an area that you’re supposed to be in, you’re enhanced by all the extra energy that’s possible because the decision has been made that Wadada is going to be a composer and a trumpet player, and I knew that at 12. I’ve never changed my direction, or my desire of what to be, from the age of 12 until now.
TC
Is there anything else that you were listening to that was really influencing you or that helped you figure out that you wanted to be a performer and a composer or was that just an internal decision?
WLS
Well, I think it was bold but the primary target for me was that when I was eight, nine, or ten, my stepfather was a blues master and he called himself like most southern guys, Little Bill. And he had two, three other bands and he was quite an artist. Sometimes on Sunday nights they would not perform, they would have no performance, and so he and other musicians would get together at my house on a Sunday night and they would play electric instruments but would play them acoustically. And that meant that you could hear these sounds and these buzzes on a wood fingerboard, a beautiful sound. And because I was a boy, I was allowed to sit on the couch with them and their whole goal is that they were playing for themselves. And so they would play their guitars and they would each have to tell a story after a piece. And the stories they called “top lies,” who would tell the best lie.
And there would also be drinking and on those particular Sunday nights. I would fall asleep on the couch listening to them, and I think that had something to do with it as well. And my stepfather, when I went to him and said … and I’m still 12 years old, I go to him and I said, “Listen, I want to play with you.” He said, “No, you can’t play with me, you can’t play with me.” I said, “Well, okay.” I went out and I found myself a band.
No, before I did that, I asked my mom what I could do and I approached it really strategically. I said, “Mom, how old do I have to be before I start dating?” She said, “Well, at least 18, maybe 14.” Well, this was a few months before my birthday, so I’m going to be 13. So my 13th birthday, I went and found me a band to play in and that was my first performance and I’ve been performing ever since.
Music has helped me to be who I am.
TC
I know that you often write in honor of or for women that you think have been important historical figures. But I caught that also you were saying that when you were around the band, that you were able to stay because you were a boy.
WLS
Yes, yes. Because they wouldn’t allow my sisters and people like that to come into the room because they were using swearing words but also the tradition of having differences for the males than for the female. It’s still the greatest story out there. Sexism and racism, they have been going on ever since there have been people. And they could be resolved.
TC
Yeah, but I think that you also have talked about how your household was matriarchal …
WLS
Yes, my grandmother. And actually her name was Etta Brown and she made all the major decisions. When the first band came through town, I think I must have been in the 11th grade or something or 12th grade, and they were looking for a trumpet player and, of course, everybody recommended me. And I went and auditioned for them and they immediately said, “Yeah, we’d like to have you play with us.” And so now I go and I tell my mother and my mother gets together and takes me to my grandmother, who was a block away from where we lived. And they sit down and discuss all of the possibilities of it with me sitting there. And my grandmother, after this conversation, she said, “Yes, he can go.”
That was our tradition. Educating us was also part of my grandmother—she’s the one that, in her family, she’s the only person that can read and write. She belongs to many secret organizations and all kinds of cultural organizations. She would give books and leaflets and flyers about the African American experience straight across America, and she would teach us those things in her living room.
She was a midwife. In my community, every single kid that I knew that went to school with me, she delivered. She delivered over 3,000 kids, okay? And often she would not even be paid. And the reason I know that, because once I became a teenager, on Saturday mornings I would drive her to 10 or 15 houses, where she would have delivered all 10 of those kids or all five of those kids in that family, and they would give her maybe a stick of butter or a pound of flour or a bag of peanuts or something. Not peanuts, but pecans.
TC
Barter system?
WLS
Yes, yes.
TC
Do you think your music is a vehicle for teaching people about black history in a way?
WLS
Well, I think so. I like to think of it as having all kinds of lessons in it, because if you look at what I’ve put out there, like, for example, my favorite vocalist is Billie Holiday and I have recorded at least three pieces for her, maybe four. I believe there is four. And Rosa Parks, I did an oratorio for her, and plus I’ve also recorded other songs for her. And the list goes on down the line in terms of how you look at this music as being, having, of information inside of it.
My titles are very long. Sometimes people say, “Well, why do you write such long titles?” Well, the titles are actually poetry and that poetry must be understood to actually motivate some kind of research, because my titles need to be researched. Like the Great Lakes Suite, it talks about 10 billion years ago when the Great Lakes was all frozen, including the whole planet. You see? And that needs to be understood. The person that just reads the title without the research, they won’t get my intent for making the Great Lakes Suite at all.
And the same thing with my Ten Freedom Summers. If they don’t understand that Ten Freedom Summers has to do with the most turbulent time period in America, starting with 1954 with Brown v. Board of Education to 1964, that’s a tremendous time zone in American history. But if they read an interview from me, they’ll know that I named my Ten Freedom Summers “Ten Freedom Summers” because August Wilson has a ten-play cycle called The Pittsburgh Cycle that covers 100 years. It covers 100 years of African American experience in this country. And I played at his first public, at the Yale Repertory, I played in that. That was the trumpet player, that was me.
But I found out from checking his plays out how to look at Ten Freedom Summers, you see? His plays, the ten plays that he did, most writers and most of the critique and reviews I’ve read on it, they all speak of them as being a historical umbrella of a century of 100 years. It’s not. He says it quite clearly in his notes that he decided not to do a historical work, but he decided to show our experience through culture. Those pieces are about culture and not history. And so when I put together Ten Freedom Summers, miles after his hundred years, I just took one decade out of the 100 years to look at. I looked at the psychological impact of having African Americans living in America and what that did.
So there’s a large teaching confluence that’s running through what I’ve done and what August Wilson has done. And I see my work very similar to his work in terms of who we’re looking to understand.
TC
I want to bring up another figure that I think is interesting to you and important to you: Eileen Jackson Southern.
WLS
Yes.
TC
Who I think performs a very similar function, especially as an ethnomusicologist.
WLS
Yes, yes. Well, I have a deep connection with her. When she went to Harvard, she came as a tenured professor. The first African American to be tenured, woman or man [1976]. She invited me there to speak at her class because she created the African American Black Perspective in Music [1973–1990] and I had written a couple articles for her, and that’s how I made connection with her. And so she brought me to her lecture in her class, and I had a deep connection with her and in this National Parks. I made her a literary park.
But just two years ago, or three years ago, I was the Dr. Eileen Southern Visiting Artist at Harvard for a week [2016]. And the score, the Ankhrasmation score that’s inside of that, was done during that four, five days residency at Harvard in her honor. So she’s very important to me. Yes, yes.
TC
It’s an interesting moment, I think, right now because I know you wouldn’t necessarily call certain music jazz, but other people do and there’s a resurgence of an interest in jazz, whatever that may be, with a lot of younger folks. What do you make of that? I think it’s interesting that that’s also happening around the time where there is a lot of strife for black people, people of color, for women. That this interest in jazz is also emerging, it sort of feels like people always reference the 1960s coming back around in a circle, in a way. Do you, does this resonate with you?
WLS
Well, I see that as a nice phenomenon, the things of coming around quite often and stuff like that. But in the meantime, none of that music sounds like that music back then. And why keep pulling this dead weight, this dead donkey out onto the stage again and saying, “Listen, look at this jazz rising up from the dust.” Because it’s not going to rise up from the dust. Why not introduce them to music? Why not have a music … it doesn’t have to say, “the jazz writer at the Voice or the Times or whatever,” it needs to say, “music writers.” You know? No matter what it means, it’s still a title that was never selected by the people that make that on. And the young players today who come up and don’t make a distinction between that term and stuff like that, they do it because they enjoy the privilege of being part of something. But the something that they’re being part of could be even greater, I believe.
TC
It seems like it’s tied to the institutionalization of music in a lot of ways, where you go and you learn something a very specific way or you’re taught.
WLS
Yeah, it’s definitely commercial. That’s right, it’s a category. And that’s why the so-called jazz doesn’t even have a measure on the GDP, not even a point measure. And I don’t particularly care about people using the word jazz, I really don’t. I don’t care about institutions using it, etc. What I care about is that when they write about it or talk about it to me, that they select the term that I have expressed, either creative music or just music. And then I’m happy because I don’t want to change nobody’s mind, you see? My mind is already made up and it was made up from the early age of 12 years old. I didn’t even know what the word jazz meant. I never heard a player play the trumpet in that so-called jazz style until I was in my twenties. All I heard was guitar and vocals and drums and pianos, and marching bands with trumpets.
TC
And from those days, you are now as prolific as you’ve ever been.
WLS
Yes, yes. Well, I do music all the time, I write music all the time, I think about music all the time. And I have notebooks full of stuff that if I had about 20,000 years to go, I may get rid of some of them. I’ve been doing music since I was 12 and I never stopped. I got pieces in my house that have taken me four, five days to find them because stuff is not organized and so I have to search until I find what I’m looking for. And then some days I can’t find them, and you know what I do? I get tired, I go lay out on the couch, and I relax myself, and then I get up and I get me a piece of paper, music paper, and I write a new piece.
TC
So you don’t bother categorizing any of the work? You can find them later?
WLS
I can find them later, but the point is I don’t have time to organize it and catalogue it and I’ve hired a number of people over the last 10 years and all of them have been horrible. So I’m just going to leave a stack of music that will have to be shifted through here, there and there and here. And it’s just part of it. It took them 50 years to catalog Bach’s music, 50 years. I expect 100.
TC
Is there anything else that you want to convey, talk about?
WLS
When I try to feel, what should I say? I can say this to everybody out there, including myself, that art was put into society for a reason and that reason is deeply, deeply connected with our development as a species and that if we are able to just tap into just a tiny bit of it, our journey on this planet would be most magnificent and unforgettable. And a performance is a small, miniature moment, like that journey, that can be inculcated in our hearts for moments when we have low moments and for moments when we have high moments, to give us that good balance. So performance is crucial to our life journey because it models our life journey in a small cell of which we can manage what is happening, and then the inspiration to go out and not only be ourselves but to become able to move mountains, as they say.
TC
Well, thank you, Wadada. It’s been such a pleasure.
WLS
Thank you, my pleasure too. Believe me.
Wadada Leo Smith, interview by Taja Cheek, in, Creative Black Music at the Walker: Selections from the Archives, ed. Simone Austin and Danielle A. Jackson, Vol. IV of the Living Collections Catalogue (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2020).
A leading force in the realms of improvisation and composition, Wadada Leo Smith is an educator, writer, an early and primary member in the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), and an accomplished visual artist. Smith defines his craft and life’s work as creative music and is revered as one of the form’s most innovative and influential practitioners.
A multi-instrumentalist and assistant curator at MoMA PS1 in New York, Taja Cheek is dedicated to experimental and improvised music. As a performing artist, she recently collaborated on the exhibition Kevin Beasley: A view of a landscape (2018) at the Whitney Museum of American Art. In 2017, she released her debut solo album L’Rain. Cheek has a BA with distinction in American Studies from Yale University.
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