WADADA LEO SMITH – ANTHONY DAVIS
WADADA LEO SMITH – ANTHONY DAVIS
- Starts
- 20:30
Duo with groundbreaking composers from the Afro-American avant-garde. Smith and Davis have both shown great social consciousness in their music.
Trumpet player Wadada Leo Smith and pianist Anthony Davis have been working together as musicians for 40 years. Both came up in the American avant-jazz of the 1970s, developing themselves as composers. Smith and Davis have both shown great social consciousness in their music.
In 2013 Wadada Leo Smith was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize with his magnum opus Ten Freedom Summers, about the American Civil Rights Movement. In the same year he was chosen as Best Composer in the Downbeat Critics Polls. Smith developed a unique musical language, according to himself in the tradition of Duke Ellington’s Sacred Concerts, A Love Supreme and Meditations by John Coltrane and George Russell’s Electronic Sonata For Souls Loved By Nature.
With his most famous work X – The Life and Times of Malcolm X (1983), Anthony Davis wrote the first American opera on a contemporary political subject. Davis was trained in the classical tradition and made name as a jazz musician, but his compositions for piano are even more broadly oriented, for example his masterpiece Lady of the Mirrors (1980), which was strongly influenced by Indonesian music.
‘Wadada is one of the most imaginative and explorative composers in creative music. He is a national treasure’ (John Zorn).
The Bimhuis restaurant is open prior to the concert from 6.30 til 8.30PM (reservations via 020-7882158). After the concert, the Bimhuis Café is open (free entrance).
Wadada Leo Smith trompet, Anthony Davis piano