Though trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith is a leading maestro of abstraction, he loves a straightforward concept as much as anyone else. Over the last decade, he’s composed The Great Lakes Suites, as well as the expansive Civil Rights-themed project Ten Freedom Summers (which drew from avant-jazz and modern-classical languages). For his 2016 album with pianist Vijay Iyer, Smith wrote a tribute to the African American contralto Marian Anderson.
Musical dedications are now as much a part of Smith’s process as the experimental nature of his fiery improvisations. But these historical shout-outs are not just creative prompts that he uses to get his writing hand going. Smith’s monuments often develop into sly editorials. When the composer extends his Civil Rights-era meditation to include 21st-century events, it’s his way of diagnosing the lingering nature of vintage prejudices.
America’s National Parks clearly fits in among these trends in Smith’s latter-day output. The double-album contains the veteran jazz quartet that helped power Summers, and adds in the impressive cello work of Ashley Walters. While the ensemble’s size is smaller than that of the group that recorded Summers, this lineup has the same jazz-plus-classical range of instrumental attack. And Smith’s commentary resides in his choices of grounds to celebrate. These include national parks already in operation—like Yellowstone—but also hallowed cultural zones not yet recognized by government decree.
The title of the opening movement, “New Orleans: The National Culture Park USA 1718,” references the pre-American nature of the city’s founding by the French Mississippi Company. Yet the loping quality of the opening groove shows that Smith is commending this location as a potential national park on the basis of its relationship to jazz. The tempo is slow, and sometimes makes way for beat-free stretches of sound. But overall, it still has a finger-snapping, swinging feel—thanks to the way bassist John Lindberg and drummer Pheeroan akLaff emphasize the underlying pulse.
At first, the mood occupies a middle ground between celebration and solemn observation—as Smith’s trumpet switches from bright lines of heraldry to subtler harmonizing with Walters’ bowed cello lines. Then, a few minutes in, a faster beat arrives. Smith responds with a muted-trumpet solo full of pristine, bluesy poise. Eventually, the pianist (and excellent composer) Anthony Davis gets a lengthy feature that closes with an impressionistic, dreamy cadenza. At this juncture, the opening track is barely half over—and it’s already given listeners a trio of distinct, memorable worlds.
As with other ambitious projects from Smith, America’s National Parks wants your focused attention, and your time. But the rewards it offers can make those substantial requests feel justified. The most dramatic mix of styles comes during the half-hour piece “The Mississippi River: Dark and Deep Dreams Flow the River—a National Memorial Park c. 5000 BC.” Grim piano chords and ominously bowed strings suggest a potential for violence, before the album’s most powerful stretches of free-improv bashing make good on the threat. (Smith describes this “park” as “a memorial site which was used as a dumping place for black bodies by hostile forces in Mississippi.”)
Elsewhere, the stark, sometimes violent majesty of the natural world is conjured by imposing blocks of atonal modernism, during “Sequoia/Kings Canyon National Parks: The Giant Forest, Great Canyon, Cliffs, Peaks, Waterfalls and Cave Systems 1890.” And a tender beauty is fostered in the chamber music writing of Smith’s most abstract, conceptual idea in this series: “Eileen Jackson Southern, 1920-2002: A Literary National Park.” (Southern was the Harvard musicologist who wrote The Music of Black Americans, among other important works.)
The album isn’t quite the overwhelming achievement that Ten Freedom Summers was, though the refined ensemble playing of Smith’s newly convened “Golden Quintet” is consistently ravishing. And the duration of the set gradually proposes a unique charm. Once you travel all the way to a monument, you don’t take a quick look and then leave. In similar fashion, these extended tributes create a persuasive argument regarding the attention still due to a nation’s history, and its cultural variety.
