Wadada Leo Smith & Sylvie Courvoisier - Angel Falls

The Free Jazz Collective 100

By Don Phipps

Dissonance. Abstraction. Tonal clusters. Flurries. Rolling ostinatos. Ornate and defiant piercings. These are some of the various musical elements of Angel Falls, a striking masterpiece of space and sound generated by two of the best – the legendary Mississippi-born Wadada Leo Smith on trumpet (now 83) and the always fascinating Swiss pianist Sylvie Courvoisier. The duo draws on a range of influences and idioms to construct their tone poems. From the formal classical side, one can hear degrees of impressionism, Messiaen abstractions, and Charles Ives. Then there are bouncy, jagged blues passages (the ending of “Naomi’s Peak”) and of course plenty of improvisatory and experimental jazz.

From this diverse palette, Smith and Courvoisier deliver striking and challenging explorations that boggle and intrigue. To illustrate, listen to the album’s longest piece, “Angel Falls” and its shortest piece, “Sonic Utterance.” On “Angel Falls,” Courvoisier creates a dissonant barely audible opening by stroking the inside of the piano. The duo proceeds to fashion a dark meditative impression that evolves into a rolling stormy motif. Smith always finds just the right note to craft his reflective mood while Courvoisier goes from pianissimo to forte on the keys in short order, creating sparkling color and deep textures. Both explore the highest and lowest notes on their respective instruments – creating a sense of awe, yearning, and other moods and expressions. There is a point where Courvoisier constructs a full-blooded harmonic maelstrom and Smith responds with hard blowing high notes to produce dramatic effect. The soul-searching continues, as Courvoisier’s passages build into a cliff like peak underneath Smith’s sostenuto responses.

On “Sonic Utterance,” Courvoisier generates precise jarring attacks with tonal clusters while Smith demonstrates his breathing technique, uttering low volume blues phrases above Courvoisier’s back and forth splashes. The music alternates between peaceful interludes and explosions until Courvoisier develops a wandering, repeating motif underneath Smith’s muted trumpet. A roller coaster ride ensues, and Courvoisier really brings it towards the end – with fierce abstractions that seem to explode off the keys like fireworks.

The high degree of formalism found on Angel Falls does not detract from the spontaneity and openness found within the music. It enhances it, giving the music the foundation necessary to develop and explore impulsively and creatively. Art can be representative and exist beneath conscious reality. And this album most certainly is a work of art. Enjoy!

The Free Jazz Collective 0

By Ferruccio Martinotti

Last quarter of the year and the top seeded players enter the court: Sylvie Courvoisier and Wadada Leo Smith together on Angel Falls, out for Intakt Records. Should someone need to get acquainted with these two Aces, the simple, right move to be done is to check the Free Jazz Blogs’s past pages where both of them are hugely covered, especially Stef’s peerless reviews of Wadada, making him the Supreme Cantor of the trumpeter. For what is worth, our cups of tea are America along with the late Jack DeJohnette and Sacred Ceremonies with Milford Graves and Bill Laswell but get what you prefer, even by chance, and after a couple of notes it will be perfectly clear for you that the trumpet of our 84 years old hero is a prism refracting the sound, opening sonic worlds or better to say, sonic galaxies. Madame Courvoisier, Swiss born and New York based, for the sake of our sheer, infinite pleasure, delivered in the last years a body of astonishing music, showing to old and new listeners her palette of piano ammunitions, be alone (To be other-wise), with her trio (Free Hoops), with Mary Halvorson (Bone Bells) or in a larger ensemble such as Chimaera, an absolute 2024 masterpiece that sees Sylvie teaming up with Wadada, Nate Wooley, Christian Fennesz, Drew Gress and Kenny Wollesen.

The pianist and the trumpeter first played together in 2017 at a concert organized by John Zorn and as Courvoisier recalls: “Right after he asked me for my number and a couple of months later we did a recording in New Haven, in trio with Marcus Gilmore”. The outcome of that session has yet to see the light of the day but there have been regular collaborations since, including further trios with drummers Kenny Wollesen and Nasheet Waits, a Smith ensemble with two pianos. Given the love of Wadada for duos with piano (see the works with Vijay Iyer, John Tilbury, Angelica Sanchez, Aruan Ortiz and Amina Claudine Myers), and his admiration for Sylvie (“Whenever I’ve played on stage with her, it’s always been a journey that has been mutual and creative. She’s got courage and you can see it when she’s at the piano, when she is inspired to go toward something, she doesn’t just go near it, she advances as if she’s going there to save creation”, from the liner notes) it wasn’t a matter of “If” but of “When” the two would have entered a studio together. This happened in October 2024 at Octaven Audio, Mount Vernon, NY for an output of 8 magnificent compositions that sound as the perfect epitome of such top notch musicians. Wadada spacious notes don’t hide their blues roots, while Sylvie combined upbringing of classical and jazz studies allows her to draw sonic textures that are a real, unmatched trademark; together they’re building a shadowplay of sounds, designing perfectly balanced geometries around and dissolving them into the fire soon after. 

As per the creation process of the album, let’s listen to what Courvoisier says in the liner notes: “We just played right through exactly the order of the CD and exactly the amount of music on the CD, with no edits. We probably did that in two hours and after we mixed it. The same day we recorded and mixed. We started at noon and at 5 pm it’s finished”. Are you thinking about a labour of genius? We are, too. It’s absolutely interesting to read Smith in the liner notes about the composition process: “In composing, you got the inspiration that comes to you as you construct the page. That inspiration comes throughout the process, even if it takes 5 years or 27 or 37 years to complete it. It comes off and on throughout that process. In a performance the same thing happens. The difference is that in performance you’re allowing those moments of inspiration to come directly through”. This record delivers all that and more and we let Sylvie conclude about the chemistry they’ve been able to create together: “With Wadada I feel we’re creating in the moment and I feel something very joyful. We’re like kids discovering things. I feel I can hear harmonically where he wants to go. Basically, I try to erase myself and try to make him sound great”. And there is still someone wondering why this music is floating in our bloodcells…