Wadada Leo Smith & Joe Morris - Earth’s Frequencies

The Free Jazz Collective 0

By Jury Kobayashi

On February 12^th, 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:

https://www.realartways.org/raw-events/improvisations-now/