Ten Freedom Summers

An astounding work from one of the most vital jazz performers and composers of the contemporary era, Wadada Leo Smith’s 10 Freedom Summers is an album of pointed social commentary and deeply adventurous compositions. Smith patterned 10 Freedom Summers in part on the complex chronologies favored by playwright August Wilson, whose Pittsburgh Cycle consisted of 10 plays exploring the experiences of African-Americans in 10 separate decades. Here, Wadada Leo Smith crafts a series of ambitious extended narratives that are meant to represent everything from the Dred Scott case and the Montgomery bus boycott to the deaths of Medgar Evers and Emmett Till and the passage of the Civil Rights Act. Smith and his gifted accompanists (including longtime collaborators Anthony Davis and John Lindberg, as well as comparative newcomers like Susie Ibarra) execute it all with grace and precision. 10 Freedom Summers, with its four-hour-plus runtime and myriad stylistic detours, is certainly a forbidding listen, but for those willing to devote their time and attention it will prove an infinitely rewarding one.