1. Background

2. Composition and performance

3. Critical reception

4. Track listing

5. Personnel

6. Release history

7. References

8. Further reading

9. External links

Ten Freedom Summers is a four-disc box set by American trumpeter and composer Wadada Leo Smith. It was released on May 5, 2012, by Cuneiform Records. Smith wrote its compositions intermittently over the course of 34 years, beginning in 1977, before performing them live in November 2011 at the Colburn School's Zipper Hall in Los Angeles. He was accompanied by the nine-piece Southwest Chamber Music ensemble and his own jazz quartet, featuring drummers Pheeroan akLaff and Susie Ibarra, pianist Anthony Davis, and bassist John Lindberg.

A free jazz and contemporary classical work, Ten Freedom Summers comprises 19 pieces that are mostly fully developed suites. They eschew conventional themes for abstract expressions of the subject matter, which focuses on the Civil Rights Movement and other interrelated topics. Smith cites the segregation of his native Mississippi and playwright August Wilson's The Pittsburgh Cycle as inspirations behind the work. Ten Freedom Summers received widespread acclaim from critics and was named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2013.

Background

Smith started Ten Freedom Summers in 1977, when he wrote the piece "Medgar Evers" as an evocation of the eponymous civil rights activist gunned down in Mississippi in 1963. Smith subsequently worked intermittently on the project.^[1] He spent 34 years writing it,^[2] supported by a series of residencies, grants and commissions, the final one from the Southwest Chamber Music ensemble.^[3] He completed the pieces in a flurry of activity between 2009 and 2011.^[4] Smith was inspired to assemble the pieces into one group by August Wilson's 10-play series The Pittsburgh Cycle.^[3] Smith has also said of the idea behind Ten Freedom Summers:

Composition and performance

The compositions are organized in three principal sections—"Defining Moments in America", "What Is Democracy?", and "Freedom Summers".^[4] Each section's pieces are meant to represent significant figures associated with the Civil Rights Movement during 1954 to 1964 and concepts relevant to the formation of institutions that evolved from human interaction, including government, media, and megacorporations.^[3] Jeff Dayton-Johnson from All About Jazz said although its movements "variously address Malcolm X, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Brown vs. Board of Education, Medgar Evers [and] the Little Rock Nine", the "thematic concerns nevertheless extend ... both backwards (to the 1857 Dred Scott case) and forward (to 9/11), and to a series of cross-cutting concerns (e.g., democracy, the freedom of the press and the black church)."^[4]

According to Josh Langhoff from PopMatters, the box set's pieces "transform their subjects into musical invention and moods; they’re not literal or programmatic." Langhoff finds them similar to contemporary classical pieces in how they "make their points through abstraction."^[10] Daniel Spicer of BBC Music characterized the music as "a mixture of austere contemporary classical composition performed by the LA-based Southwest Chamber Music ensemble, and turbulent free jazz improvised by the Golden Quartet".^[7] In the opinion of jazz critic John Fordham, the presence of either Smith's jazz quartet or the classical ensemble led him to abandon typical themes and continuous pulses in favor of free jazz and contemporary classical idioms.^[19] Bob Rusch believed the performances are not inspired by contemporary Civil Rights Movement music by artists such as Paul Robeson, Pete Seeger, Mahalia Jackson, or Aretha Franklin, because Smith's Golden Quintet exhibit an astral, chamber sound.^[20]

Critical reception

Reviewing for The Guardian, Fordham called the record "a landmark in jazz's rich canon",^[12] while Bill Shoemaker of The Wire regarded it as "a monumental evocation of America's civil rights movement".^[13] Glen Hall from Exclaim! wrote that "Smith's music resonates with the suffering and the dreams of a better life that embodied the decade of 1954 to 1964 that is the subject of this powerful compendium of compositions."^[14] AllMusic's Thom Jurek viewed the box set as Smith's best work, writing that it "belongs in jazz's canonical lexicon with Duke Ellington's Black Brown & Beige and Max Roach's Freedom Now Suite."^[15] Phil Johnson from The Independent found the music very gratifying, saying it sounds like if Miles Davis had recorded Ligeti compositions during the 1950s.^[16] Langhoff wrote in PopMatters that the set is "about sound: the tangible, physically beautiful sounds of Smith's imperative trumpet and of different instruments in combination, testing their own limits." In conclusion, the reviewer said "Smith writes one of America's defining events in sound, and the story is all of ours."^[17] In Cadence Magazine, Rusch was less enthusiastic about the box set, believing it would have benefitted from being released as four separate albums; listening to the entire record for him was "exhausting, but also involving and inspiring".^[18]

At the end of 2012, Ten Freedom Summers was ranked as one of the year's best jazz albums in lists published by AllMusic,^[19] All About Jazz,^[20] JazzTimes,^[21] and the Chicago Reader.^[22] Bret Saunders from The Denver Post named it 2012's best jazz record,^[23] and Down Beat magazine named it their album of the year.^[24] It was also ranked number 31 in The Wire{{'}}s list of 2012's best albums.^[25] Ten Freedom Summers was one of three finalists for the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Music, along with Aaron Jay Kernis's classical composition "Pieces of Winter Sky" and "Partita for 8 Voices" by Caroline Shaw, who ultimately won the award.^[26]

Track listing

Personnel

Credits are adapted from the album's liner notes.^[5]

• Pheeroan akLaff – drums
• Alison Bjorkedal – harp
• Dorothy Cotton – liner notes
• Dorothy Cowfield – photography
• Anthony Davis – piano
• Bill Ellsworth – package design
• Jeff Evans – editing, mixing engineer
• Jim Foschia – clarinet
• Lorenz Gamma – violin
• Golden Quartet – ensemble, main personnel
• Golden Quintet – ensemble, main personnel
• Steve Gunther – photography
• Lyn Horton – drawing
• Susie Ibarra – drums
• Michael Jackson – photography

• Peter Jacobson – cello
• Larry Kaplan – flute
• Jan Karlin – viola
• Warren K. Leffler – photography
• John Lindberg – bass
• Gene Paul – mastering engineer
• Tom Peters – bass
• Jamie Polaski – mastering assistant
• Jeff von der Schmidt – conductor
• Wadada Leo Smith – composer, executive producer, primary artist, producer, trumpet
• Matthew Snyder – engineer
• Southwest Chamber Music – ensemble, executive producer, producer
• Matthew Sumera – liner notes
• Lynn Vartan – percussion
• Shalini Vijayan – violin

Release history

References

Further reading

• {{cite journal |last1= Fischlin|first1= Daniel|date= 2012|title= Improvocracy, or Improvising the Civil Rights Movement in Wadada Leo Smith's Ten Freedom Summers |url= http://www.criticalimprov.com/article/view/1965/2597|journal= Critical Studies in Improvisation |volume= 8|issue= 1|pages= |doi= }}
• {{cite web|last=Matzner|first=Franz A.|date=March 14, 2011|url=http://www.allaboutjazz.com/php/article.php?id=38888|title=Wadada Leo Smith: The Teacher|work=All About Jazz}}
• {{cite news|last=Ratliff|first=Ben|date=May 3, 2013|url=https://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/03/arts/music/ten-freedom-summers-by-wadada-leo-smith.html?_r=0|title=Stirring and Sad, a Jazz Montage of a Struggle|newspaper=The New York Times|page=C1}}

External links

• {{Official website|http://www.wadadaleosmith.com/pages/ten_freedom.html}}
• Stuart Broomer's pointofdeparture column on the album and related topics
• Ten Freedom Summers at Cuneiform Records
• {{Discogs release|3565068|Ten Freedom Summers|type=album}}

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