1986 · Album
The Blue Mountain's Sun Drummer
Recorded 1986, live broadcast at WBRS, Brandeis University · Kabell (2010 release) · Produced by Not specified
Two Voices in Invisible Dialogue
Smith's radiant sound floats over Blackwell's impossibly relaxed drumming in pure conversation.
This is a radio broadcast, captured live at Brandeis University in 1986, that sat in the archive for nearly a quarter-century before anyone heard it. Wadada Leo Smith on trumpet and Ed Blackwell on drums, nothing else — just the two of them in a room, the tape rolling, no safety net. Smith had already developed his distinctive vocabulary by then, a sound built on silence as much as sound, every note placed with intention. Blackwell was coming out of decades with Don Cherry and the Ornette Coleman circle, but Down Beat reviewer John Corbett hears something different here: Smith isn't channeling Cherry or anyone else. His approach is too specific, too controlled. What emerges is a kind of invisible conversation, where Smith's warm, projective tone — radiant is the word Corbett uses, and it sticks — floats over Blackwell's drumming without any sense of strain or negotiation. Blackwell sounds genuinely relaxed, which is harder than it sounds when you're the only timekeeper in a two-person space. The album spent decades unreleased because that's how Smith has often worked, documenting sessions without immediate commercial pressure. When it finally came out on his Kabell label in 2010, it stood as evidence of something specific: two individualists who didn't need to prove anything, just playing the music that was in front of them that day.
