2021 · Album
Sacred Ceremonies
Recorded May 26–27, 2016 and December 11–12, 2015 · TUM Records · Location: Orange Music Sound Studios, West Orange, New Jersey
Three Paths Through History and Healing
Smith and Graves navigate polyrhythms and memory, transmitting information about ancestors with potent clarity.
Sacred Ceremonies arrives late in Wadada Leo Smith's career as a deliberate return to ritual and documentation. At this stage, he's no longer searching; he's bearing witness. The three-disc structure reflects this maturity—each configuration strips away or adds elements, allowing different conversations to breathe. Disc one pairs Smith with Milford Graves in stripped-down duo, recorded in May 2016. Their interplay on tracks like "Baby Dodds In Congo Square" isn't about virtuosity but about naming. Smith's trumpet speaks the history while Graves's polyrhythms seem to hold multiple timelines at once. The weight of what's being said—the place, the musician being honored—overtakes any need for conventional resolution.
Disc two shifts the dynamic entirely. Bill Laswell's electric bass enters, and the sonics darken. Smith and Laswell dedicate pieces to Tony Williams and Donald Ayler, translating loss and influence into spare, deliberate statements. Laswell doesn't ornament; he anchors. The final disc, recorded earlier (December 2015) with all three together, reaches for something larger. When Smith, Laswell, and Graves align, the music touches on myth, justice, and healing—not as abstractions but as lived urgency.
This is Smith doing archival work through sound rather than annotation. He's not inventing new territory here; he's making visible what already exists in African American jazz genealogy. For listeners new to his work, this box set demands patience but rewards it with unusual clarity about what jazz can do when ego steps aside.
Where next?
More by Milford Graves
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