Wadada Leo Smith – Ten Freedom Summers

May 22, 2012 • Cuneiform Records

Time for something a bit different, time to review something new. Ten Freedom Summers was a much-discussed album last year and (as usual) I was late to pick up on it, as not only had I never heard of Smith before but the album itself is a big one to swallow. Even though I've been getting into jazz in a big way during the last couple of years, nothing quite prepared me for this, and I'm not very taken with what I've gotten.

Admittedly, this is one of the most difficult jazz albums I've ever listened to—even knowing this going in, it's still a long trip. The album's enormous four-and-a-half hour runtime is, of course, a huge barrier to entry for many people, and I myself found that listening to the album in its entirety quickly felt like something I was forcing myself to do rather than enjoying the music as it came. Eventually I decided on putting all the tracks on shuffle and hearing just a few at a time, so as to not tire myself out—but you still don't get the whole picture that way.

Length aside, the music itself can still be very hard to process. It dances back and forth from arrhythmic bop to improvisational, dissonant free jazz to the avant-garde side of modern classical and chamber music, and just about all of those styles are frustrating here. Maybe it's just me, although I have been known to enjoy a free jazz album here and there (not a lot, but it happens); this one, though, never really catches on with me. I can't tell where the music is going or what it's trying to do. Sometimes it spazzes out in an improvisational cacophony; other times it stops completely only to let the ride cymbals or cello tinker on alone, as if they're not sure what to do. Sure, there are moments when I enjoy what the music is doing, but I'm never enthralled, never hooked, and I'm all too often bored.

Which is a shame—it's a very well-performed piece of art, and it's clear that a lot of effort went into putting it together. But on the whole it doesn't feel right to me. The good moments are too few and far between; I could probably edit this down to a one-disc album of very good jazz (what an undertaking that would be!), but the good stuff doesn't justify sitting through the rest of it. Approach cautiously.

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