Please join us for a conversation with Wadada Leo Smith, celebrated trumpeter, composer, writer, and a lifetime member of the legendary AACM collective. Smith has more than fifty albums to his name, including Ten Freedom Summers (2013), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Music, and America’s National Parks (2016), chosen as one of the best albums of 2016 by the New York Times, the NPR Jazz Critics Poll, The Wire, and many other media outlets, and voted 2016 Jazz Album of the Year in DownBeat Magazine.

Smith has been selected Jazz Artist of the Year, Composer of the Year, and Trumpeter of the Year by both DownBeat Magazine and the Jazz Journalists Association, and Artist of the year in the Jazz Times Critics Poll. He has received a Doris Duke Artist Award, the UCLA Medal, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Vision Festival’s Lifetime Achievement Award, among many other honors. In 2022, he was a Mellon Arts & Practitioner Fellow at the Yale Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity and Transnational Migration, and was commissioned by the LA Philharmonic to write the orchestral piece Gondwana: Earth, a Blue Sanctuary, Oceans, Seas, Lakes, Rivers, Springs and Lagoons; Paradise Gardens and Skies, as well as String Quartet #13, performed by the JACK Quartet.

Wadada Leo Smith’s  GIDEST Seminar will focus on his Ankhrasmation language scores. These graphic scores have been exhibited in major American museums including The Renaissance Society at The University of Chicago and the Hammer Museum in L.A., which presented Smith with the Mohn Award for Career Achievement honoring his “brilliance and resilience.” The scores have also been shown at the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts in Michigan, the Kadist Art Foundation in San Francisco, The Museum of Rhythm Łódź, Poland, and the Clemente Gallery in NYC.

This seminar is a discussion of a pre-circulated work. It can be found on the GIDEST site for attendees to read in advance.

This event is part of the bi-weekly GIDEST Seminars presented by the Graduate Institute for Design, Ethnography & Social Thought.