Two Masters in Intimate Conversation
The austere stillness at the heart of Smith's music anchored by DeJohnette's powerful drum mastery.
Wadada Leo Smith and Jack DeJohnette had proposed this collaboration to ECM thirty years earlier. The label turned them down. By 2008, when they finally recorded America, Smith was deep into his mature period—no longer the young iconoclast but a fully formed voice, and DeJohnette was still the thinking drummer's drummer, capable of anything from metronomic precision to cosmic abstraction. This record is neither a late-career statement nor a nostalgia project. It's simply what two master musicians sound like when they finally get the time together they always wanted.
The music here is austere but never cold. Smith's trumpet work favors space over spray—long tones that seem to hold their breath, angular phrases that ask questions without demanding answers. DeJohnette never pushes or rushes. He listens first, responds second, his drumming measured and powerful in equal weight. There's no soloing in the traditional sense, no trading fours. Instead they orbit each other, testing the air, finding where their ideas align and where they deliberately diverge. The regal austerity that Troy Collins heard in All About Jazz—that measured precision, neither overwrought nor timid—comes from two musicians who understand that restraint is a form of strength.
This is not Smith doing what he always does, because Smith has always been willing to change. It's two players of different generations discovering that their sensibilities, formed in different eras, speak the same language. For committed listeners of either artist, America fills a gap that shouldn't have existed.
Who's playing
Wadada Leo Smithtrumpet
Jack DeJohnettedrums
Where next?
More by Wadada Leo Smith
Saturn, Conjunct the Grand Canyon in a Sweet Embrace 2004
Organic Resonance 2003
Lake Biwa 2004
Wisdom in Time 2007
The musicians on this record
Their own records, close in time
