Wadada Leo Smith, JazzFest Berlin, October 30, 2025. Photo © Berliner Festspiele / Camille Blake.
The first of three subscriber posts on Substack on this year’s JazzFest Berlin. The first two are longer essays on particular sets by Wadada Leo Smith and Vijay Iyer and by Pat Thomas, the third a more general overview of the festival.
How to describe Smith’s sound? You could say: “Smith plays a Yamaha custom Xeno II 1993 silver trumpet with a Monette mouthpiece. He also has a Flugelhorn and mouthpiece, built by Erhurt Todt in 1981, in what was then East Germany.” You could use words like “regal” (Jonathan Finlayson) or “majestic” (Roy Hargrove). And, since at least Notes (8 Pieces) Source a New World Music: Creative Music (1973), Smith has been a longstanding and capacious theorist of his own music and the notational and philosophical system which expresses it, Ankhrasmation. But neither technical breakdown nor metaphorics, still, will get at this thing, Smith’s sound, which is so palpably material, cuts so keenly through air and ear, and yet so evades the mechanics of language, of description scientific or poetic.
The full post can be read here.
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