Smith's Experimental Detour Into Digital Textures
Short sketches with trumpet, guitar, voice, and computer sounds that don't quite hold together.
By 2005, Wadada Leo Smith had spent decades establishing himself as a conceptual composer and trumpet virtuoso, moving beyond bebop into his own language of composed improvisation. Snakish represents a late-career left turn — a studio date that leans hard into electronic textures and collective composition, with each bandmember contributing short pieces. The instrumentation alone signals departure: Smith's trumpet sits alongside Miroslav Tadić's guitar, Mark Nauseef on percussion and electronics, Katya Quintus on voice, and Walter Quintus handling computer sounds. It's an odd ensemble, and the album knows it.
The 15 short compositions function more as sketches than developed ideas. There's color in the approach — the interplay between acoustic and digital, the sparse use of voice, the way Smith's horn floats through ambient washes. But the pieces rarely build momentum or create what Derek Taylor of Dusted Magazine called a "consistent narrative thrust." The variegated instrumentation, meant to explore sound, often leaves tracks feeling fragmentary instead. This isn't Smith deploying his lyrical trumpet strength or mining the harmonic depth he brought to earlier work — it's Smith experimenting, and not all experiments land.
Snakish sits apart from Smith's stronger recordings, a curiosity rather than a destination for newcomers. Serious listeners tracking his evolution may engage with it as a detour, but it doesn't rank among his essential work. The record feels most like what it actually is: a session where interesting elements failed to cohere.
