By Jury Kobayashi
On February 12th, 2023, I was fortunate enough to attend a
concert featuring Wadada Leo Smith and Joe Morris at Morris’s concert
series Improvisation Now, which is held at Hartford Connecticut’s Real Art
Ways. The concert left a huge impact on me, and I spent a solid year
contemplating what I heard on that day. What I did not realize was that
fortunately enough the concert was recorded and has since been released as
an album titled Earth’s Frequencies.
This album is an important document of two seasoned musicians performing
together at the highest level. There was something electric in the air that
day—I remember the audience being crammed in and watching additional chairs
being set up to accommodate a larger audience than was originally
anticipated. I remember looking around and recognizing faces of many
musicians in the audience, all of whom were anticipating what was about to
happen.
What happened that day was magic. It was one of those musical experiences
that is hard to describe but you know when you are listening to it that you
will never forget it. The recording captures the magic beautifully. The
album itself is impeccably recorded, mixed, and mastered. The album artwork
is striking, and the packaging of the CD comes together perfectly.
Describing the music in the album is not an easy task. Smith and Morris
engaged in a highly precise performance where they played in an intense
duet which, owing to Smith’s conception of Rhythm-Units and Morris’s
careful study of Smith’s music, resulted in a complex tapestry of sound and
silence. Sounds emerged from both players respective instruments sometimes
with piercing accents that die away and other times emerging and growing
out of silence. Morris’s guitar is breath-like in this performance, and it
often sounds like an organ somehow swelling into Smith’s beautiful trumpet
playing. Smith changes timbre frequently with the careful use of a mute or
un-muted trumpet or simply with changes in embouchure. The result is a
fantastic set of sounds and some of the most sophisticated level of music
making that I have ever heard. This album is a must have and this concert
series is one to pay attention to.
A note on the concert series: Improvisation Now is a concert series curated
by Joe Morris at Real Art Ways a gallery located in Hartford Connecticut.
Morris invites a variety of improvisers to play, and he often plays both
guitar and bass. This year will see Morris also on percussion and
electronics and banjouke as well. A link to the series can be found below: