Anthony Braxton Trio - Wadada Leo Smith's Silver Orchestra - Angel City Jazz Festival

Wadada Leo Smith's Silver Orchestra opens this concert.

Anthony Braxton is recognized as one of the most important musicians, educators, and creative thinkers of the past 50 years, highly esteemed in the creative music community for the revolutionary quality of his work and for the mentorship and inspiration he has provided to generations of younger musicians. Drawing upon a disparate mix of influences from John Coltrane to Karlheinz Stockhausen to Native American music, Braxton has created a unique musical system that celebrates the concept of global creativity and our shared humanity. His work examines core principles of improvisation, structural navigation and ritual engagement—innovation, spirituality and intellectual investigation. His many accolades include a 1981 Guggenheim Fellowship, a 1994 MacArthur Fellowship, a 2013 Doris Duke Performing Artist Award and a 2014 NEA Jazz Master Award.

Silver Orchestra is an ensemble consisting of twelve instrumentalists and was created with a vision that concerns an exploration of musical languages and systems with a developed experimental performance practice for the larger ensemble.

The creative orchestra as a unit is a perfect universe organized by the musical director as a utopian model. This model is also a social organism which functions within the context of democratic ideas and embodies the individual and the collective expressions. Silver Orchestra’s music is the result of the particular view of its creator, the composer/improviser/performer. Sonic-unit fields within the context of the performance space are used to redefine and orchestrate a complex music field where the relations of its instrumental tonalities, sound, rhythm, range, weight, spatial depth, silence, and space (horizontal and vertical); its velocity/density/textural structure (with their rates of evolution scored) are the elements of building a new creative orchestra. With this musical construction, the Silver Orchestra creates a multi-sonic spectrum, that when realized in performance is much larger in sound form than ensembles employing the triadic and harmonic traditions. The rhythm-unit fields play a vital role as to how the sonic fields will shapes the philosophical and psychological meaning that is always inherited within every constructed music object.

To achieve a different ensemble for the composer / improviser /performer I developed a new system of rhythm-unit sets that was non-metrical in design, and would maintain that authentic energy that rhythm has. These rhythm-unit sets were designed to preserve the function of motion / flow activity, and also to articulate an emotional range that contains the same aesthetic beauty which is associated with the practice of metrical rhythms today. Silver Orchestra’s music is powerful, fiery and polycentric in its interactive character with a contemporary spiritual consciousness that is heartfelt and is connected with the human experience. The ensemble’s textural and structural materials reveal a musical terrain that is creatively rich in its rhythmic / sonic spectrum and architecturally clear in form.

Silver Orchestra can be heard on Wadada Leo Smith's “Lake Biwa” CD on Tzadik Records.