Leo Smith's "A Love Sonnet for Billie Holiday" and "The Chicago Symphonies"

Since retiring from academia in 2013 and returning to New Haven, trumpeter-composer Wadada Leo Smith -- who turns 80 on December 18 -- has been in an upsurge of creativity, much of it documented on the Finnish Tum Records label. Smith's latest Tum releases include a trio with two distinguished alumni -- leaders in their own right -- of his Golden Quartet, and a four-disc set of symphonies celebrating the contributions of Chicagoans (and figures associated with the Windy City) to music, the other arts, and social progress.

Like Miles and Don Cherry, Smith says a lot very simply through his open or muted horn. On A Love Sonnet for Billie Holiday and The Chicago Symphonies, his compositions unfold in accordance with their melodic contours, rather than any imperative to forward motion (which I remember someone in the '70s telling me was the very definition of jazz). This use of silence and space to evoke stillness harkens back to his 1969 compositions "The Bell" and "Silence," recorded with Anthony Braxton and Leroy Jenkins. His present day collaborators are attuned to these requirements, and to each other.

I saw Jack DeJohnette, who drums on both new releases, with the Gateway Trio in '75, and he was one of my favorite bandleaders of the '70s and '80s with his Directions, New Directions, and Special Edition outfits. It's easy to forget that he hails from Chicago and was associated with the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) before leaving town for historic stints with Charles Lloyd and Miles Davis. As if to remind us, DeJohnette released Made In Chicago, a festival recording with AACM eminences Muhal Richard Abrams, Roscoe Mitchell, and Henry Threadgill (whose alto and flute grace three of the Chicago Symphonies) in 2015. On the trio album's title track, it's intriguing to hear this master of groove and swing inhabiting a space that's less concerned with pulse than with tone and texture. DeJohnette's "Song for World Forgiveness" adds some rustic lyricism to the proceedings, while the closing group improv "Rocket" finds him on more familiar rhythmic ground.

Pianist Vijay Iyer, the third member of the trio, first appeared on my radar a decade or so ago in the cooperative trio Fieldwork with Tyshawn Sorey. Besides acoustic piano, his instrumental array includes organ and electronics. (Like Craig Taborn and Jason Moran, he's of a generation that teethed on hip-hop as well as jazz and fusion.) Iyer was in the Golden Quartet lineup that included drummer Ronald Shannon Jackson, featured in Jacques Goldstein's documentary Eclipse. In that setting, he played both Chick Corea and Keith Jarrett to the leader's Miles. Here, on his composition "Deep Time No. 1," Iyer creates an electronic bed, including a sampled Malcolm X speech, on which to overlay shimmering electric piano washes and drum clatter. On Smith's dedication to original Golden Quartet pianist Anthony Davis, Iyer bears the weight of the music's harmonic density.

Inspired by Don Cherry's Symphony for Improvisers, The Chicago Symphonies is the second outing by Smith's Great Lakes Quartet: Smith, DeJohnette, Threadgill, and a frequent Smith collaborator, bassist John Lindberg. It's a pleasure to hear Pulitzer Prize-winner Threadgill, who's led some of the most important bands of the era (including Air, the Henry Threadgill Sextett, Very Very Circus, and Zooid) interpreting another composer's scores. The sound of the two men's horns blending their voices and trading solos is a delight, as is the elastic rhythmic flow Lindberg and DeJohnette produce together. The contrast between Smith's long-tone melodies and busy accompaniments harkens back to Ornette but goes much further in its development.

Like much of Smith's later output -- beginning with the 2012 masterwork Ten Freedom Summers -- the symphonies' programmatic content displays a concern with history that provides valuable context for the music. (For interested listeners who are unfamiliar with the AACM saga, a perusal of George Lewis' A Power Stronger Than Itself might be useful.) The movements of the four symphonies contain dedications, sometimes to multiple individuals, sometimes to participants in this recording. That's not to say that these pieces literally recapitulate their honorees' accomplishments; for instance, the fourth movement of the Gold Symphony, dedicated to Louis Armstrong, Earl Hines, Lil Hardin Armstrong, and Baby Dodds, is hardly an homage to the Hot Fives and Sevens. Rather, the various movements are Smith's responses to the achievements of his forebears and contemporaries, and their ongoing importance, now and in the future.

It's that focus on futurity that makes the dedication of the Sapphire Symphony -- with a relative newcomer, reedman Jonathan Haffner, performing ably in place of Threadgill -- to Presidents Lincoln and Obama seem so poignant. Reading the texts to Lincoln's Gettysburg Address and Obama's 2015 remarks at the Edmund Pettis Bridge in Selma, both of which are reproduced in the booklet that accompanies this set (Tum knows how to package this music in a form worthy of its quality and importance), one can't help but reflect on how hard-won are the freedom struggles in this country, and how tenuous are their gains without our continual vigilance.