Wadada Leo Smith: America Transformed

7 p.m. doors / 7:30-9:30 p.m. performance
Don Buchwald Theater
$30 general (discounts available for students, faculty, staff, veterans, and seniors, contact box office for more info)

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The Leonard & Claire Tow Center for the Performing Arts at Brooklyn College is pleased to launch its Fall 2023 program with the work of world-renowned composer Wadada Leo Smith. Premiering over four days at Brooklyn College’s new acoustically exceptional Don Buchwald Theater, America Transformed features 18 compositions by Smith created between 1985–2023. The program will include an essay by Grammy-winning music writer, Thulani Davis.

America Transformed is a spiritual sequel to Smith’s much-lauded Ten Freedom Summers, which was named a finalist for the 2013 Pulitzer Prize in music. Where that monumental piece encompassed a decade in America’s struggle for civil rights, America Transformed, written over 37 years, widens the lens even further, exploring the artists and activists who have fought to realize the Constitutional promise of freedom and equality for all in the United States. Smith says: “The collections are centered around those individuals, events, and ideas that forced the articles of the Constitution to be employed and enforced by Congress into protecting the interests of the American people.”

The trumpeter and composer was part of the first generation of musicians to come out of Chicago’s Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) and has established himself as one of the leading composers and performers of creative contemporary music. Since the early 1970s, Smith has mostly led his groups, including the ensembles New Dalta Akhri, N’Da Kulture, the Golden Quartet and Quintet, the Silver Orchestra, Organic, Mbira, the Great Lakes Quartet, and Najwa. His epic tribute to the Civil Rights movement, Ten Freedom Summers, was one of three finalists for the Pulitzer Prize in Music in 2013. From 2021-22, Smith celebrated his 80th birthday with a stunning series of releases on TUM Records, including a set of solo trumpet music; a meeting of masters with Bill Laswell and Milford Graves; trumpet-drum duos with Pheeroan akLaff, Andrew Cyrille, Han Bennink and Jack DeJohnette; a trio outing with DeJohnette and Vijay Iyer; a set by his Great Lakes Quartet featuring Henry Threadgill; and the seven-volume collection String Quartets Nos. 1–12.