The Year of the Elephant

Wadada Leo Smith's Golden Quartet

BBC

Like many of his Chicagoan colleagues, Wadada Leo Smith's work has stretched way beyond 'jazz' to include compositions for string quartet, studies of ethnic musics and free improvisation. As a trumpeter and composer, he's been responsible for some pretty amazing (and sometimes undervalued) music, from his 70s work with Anthony Braxton to the spiritual classic Divine Love and his Yo! Miles project with guitarist Henry Kaiser, which paid homage to Miles Davis' electric period.

The Golden Quartet line up was a dream Smith had nurtured for some 30 years till their formation in 2000. The dreaded word 'supergroup' may be in order here; we have pianist Anthony Davis (whose association with Smith stretches back to the mid 70s and who's no mean composer himself), legendary Art Ensemble of Chicago bassist Malachi Favors Maghostut, and the estimable Jack deJohnette (star drummer for Miles, Keith Jarrett and pretty much everyone else).

Smith, like Roscoe Mitchell, values space and the empathy shown by this band ensures that despite its all star nature, there's plenty of it. There's no free jazz scramble; instead the music has the coolly passionate feel of Miles's classic quintet in their late, just-going-electric mode. Think Filles de Kilimanjaro or Water Babies. Davis sprays ripples of Wurlitzer type electric piano over Favors and DeJohnette's warm, funk tinged swing or lays down plangent, rich chording on acoustic piano. His composers earÊon alert, Davis achieves a fruity collision of classical form and improv fire.

Smith is on incendiary form; his rich, burnished tone echoes the effortless weight and authority of Miles, particularly on the opening 'Al Madinah'. His swooning harmon muted tones on the sumptuous ballad 'Piru' are tender, fragile and majestic in equal measure, while his duet with Davis on the episodic, through-composed "Kangaroo's Hollow" is a technical tour de force. Ideas are tossed round with bewildering speed throughout.

Favors is a towering presence as always; equipped with a warm, honeyed tone on the bass,Êhis stately lines alternately float over or lock with DeJohnette's shifting, airy patterns. The drummer is predictably brilliant, though the rhythmic shoehorning that dominates the closing "Miles Star in 3 Parts" seems stiff and unwieldy, snuffing out any heat generated by the players. Mostly though, this is exploratory, passionate jazz that's made with love and skill by four singular talents; a supergroup in the truest sense of the word. Recommended.

San Francisco Bay Guardian

Smith has never renounced his affection for Miles Davis. Smith has been a longtime member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians and has collaborated with Anthony Braxton and many others, but his allegiance to Davis was evident in his pivotal participation in Yo Miles! projects with guitarist Henry Kaiser, and it surfaces again with his Golden Quartet.The touchstone here is less the jazz-rock of Davis's mid-'70s electric period (although the closing homage, "Miles Star in 3 Parts," boasts an indelibly funky hook) than the reflective spaciousness of such earlier transitional Davis albums as Filles de Kilimanjaro.

Individual resumes qualify this foursome, which first recorded for Tzadik in 2000, as a bona fide supergroup. Bassist Malachi Favors Maghostut has long anchored the Art Ensemble of Chicago. Jack DeJohnette drummed for Davis, records and tours with Keith Jarrett, and leads his own groups. And classically influenced pianist Anthony Davis has established himself as an esteemed composer of symphonic, chamber, choral, and operatic works (including X and Amistad). Pooling their talents within the loose-limbed harmonic and rhythmic frameworks of six Smith compositions, they communicate so fluidly that a listener can focus on each musician's contributions (Favors's warm, resilient bass lines, Davis's unique chordal ideas, and DeJohnette's proliferating patterns and occasionally Wurlitzer-like synth accents) while embracing the overall flow.

Smith, who teaches at Cal Arts, is especially brilliant, using his breath, lips, mute, and amplification to adjust his trumpet and flugelhorn tones to the mood of each piece, employing silence to dramatic effect, and balancing delicacy and brute force in his obliquely melodic blues-tinged solos. Pulling up far short of free jazz cacophony, The Year of the Elephant nonetheless embodies principles of empathetic improvisation across breathtaking vistas.>