After John Coltrane’s death in 1967, the improvisational avant-garde found itself asking: Now what? Wadada Leo Smith’s discography stretches back to this critical moment in American experimentalism. As an early member of a Chicago collective, the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (or AACM), the trumpeter worked in a trio that included saxophonist Anthony Braxton and violinist Leroy Jenkins—a group documented on the landmark 1968 release 3 Compositions of New Jazz.
On that album and other recordings from the period, Smith’s performance aesthetic signaled the arrival of a confident and original voice. He could craft mournful melodic lines that suggested the folk music of his Mississippi Delta youth, before quickly steering into rough-sounding yet controlled smears of notes. Then, in the midst of an improvisation, he would allow stretches of silence to enter his phrasing. In contrast to New York’s consistently in-the-red style of free-jazz, Smith and other AACM figures also experimented with world music instrumentation and modernist chamber composition in between passages of fiery blast.
In this scene, there was nothing strange about being a blues musician, a composer of classical music, and a free-improviser with a recognizable attack. And this example has proved a durable influence on younger jazz innovators like Vijay Iyer, a pianist who spent time in Smith’s early-21st century quartet (before his own career as a bandleader took off). In interviews, Iyer is often eager to credit the AACM as an inspiration behind his own mobility as a composer and soloist.
Since signing to ECM, the storied jazz-and-classical label, Iyer has continued to vary his creative practice. The album Mutations found him composing for a string quartet, while Break Stuff—the most recent set from Iyer’s celebrated jazz trio—included an acoustic tribute to Detroit techno innovator Robert Hood. On A Cosmic Rhythm With Each Stroke, Iyer reconnects with Smith in a studio for the first time since appearing as a sideman on the trumpeter’s 2009 album Spiritual Dimensions. Their meeting here results in a frequently gorgeous, sometimes roiling set that stands out in each artist’s catalog.
The opener, “Passage,” was composed by Iyer, and works well as a platform for Smith’s range of instrumental techniques—with wisps of balladry leading to harsh and piercing moments. Some of Smith’s more surprising exclamations may initially seem like unmusical provocations, just before he wrings a demonstration of magic from his trumpet—as when he keeps a seemingly unstable drone alive for seconds, or when he creates a winning melody from an unlikely opening intonation. Iyer’s performance on piano lends dramatic shape to the track, though he’s just getting started.
The set’s centerpiece is a seven-part suite that also provides the album’s title. Inspired by the Indian artist Nasreen Mohamedi—her drawing graces the cover—this nearly hour-long stretch of music often finds Iyer switching seamlessly between acoustic piano and an electronic setup. “All Becomes Alive” begins with simmering traces of digital sound behind Smith’s high-register, incantatory playing. Near the track’s conclusion, Smith contributes tart, pointillistic figures as Iyer uses a laptop to produce a bass-heavy pulse (while keeping both hands on his piano). In the middle section, Smith responds to Iyer’s flowing, legato progressions with a mellow soulfulness.
The players occasionally push each other into less familiar zones. The first three minutes of “A Cold Fire” reveals Iyer playing more “out” than on his past ECM recordings, while on “Labyrinths,” his joint interest in Indian classical composition and American minimalism guides Smith into fixed-tempo riffing of a kind that is unusual in the trumpeter’s catalog. And when Iyer switches to Fender Rhodes for “Notes on Water,” the musicians mine the mood of Bitches Brew-era Miles Davis, while still sounding like themselves.
In conceiving such far-ranging explorations of texture, the risk for musicians is that the end result might wind up seeming like a catalog of possible approaches—a look-book to be skipped through by sound designers searching for film-music cues. But the rapport between Iyer and Smith ensures that this music always feels compositionally sure-footed, even when parts of the suite are being discovered as they play. No matter its track-to-track variance, Cosmic always sounds harmonious as an album-length statement. In doing this, it also recalls Smith’s early-career desire to integrate “all forms of music,” as stated in a 1969 interview with the French magazine Jazz Hot.
Appropriately, the closing track here is a Smith composition titled “Marian Anderson”—a dedication to the African-American contralto who broke the color barrier at the Metropolitan Opera in 1955. After the meditative theme, Smith’s conjuring of a historic opera singer’s legacy seemingly gives him license to reveal some of his most songful, pure-tone playing. “Everything and anything is valuable,” Smith told the European magazine in 1969, as the first wave of AACM players was capturing the imagination of audiences on both sides of the Atlantic. More than four decades later, Smith is still demonstrating the wisdom of this approach—reaching back into American art-music history for inspiration while keeping himself open to the new sounds being proposed by the next generation.
