Jazz As Protest
“What we could not say openly we expressed in music.” Duke Ellington
“The protest—or the demand, as I prefer to say—comes out of the content of what’s done,” he explains. “You know, the things we sing about, our approach to playing, the fact that we defined what it is we felt was an expression.” Douglas Ewart
Recorded November 2011 Wadado Leo Smith’s ‘Ten Freedom Summers’ epic work of more than 4 hours of achingly beautiful, harrowing, haunting, searching penetrating, transcendent music is nothing short of a monumental masterpiece. Every musician, every student of music, hell, everyone should hear this.