TUM Records Continues the Celebration of Wadada Leo Smith?s 80th Anniversary with two outstanding new releases. Wadada Leo Smith first met and played with Jack DeJohnette in the late 1960s and the two have collaborated with increasing frequency since. DeJohnette participated in the first recording of Smith's Golden Quartet more than two decades ago. Smith's and Iyer's first collaboration, in a later edition of the Golden Quartet, also goes back almost two decades. Nevertheless, the recording of A Love Sonnet For Billie Holiday marks the first time these three unique artists have participated in the same project and also the first time DeJohnette and Iyer have played together.
In a true collaborative spirit, A Love Sonnet For Billie Holiday features compositions by all three participants. The album opens with Smith's composition that gave the album its title. His other contribution, an extended composition titled "The A.D. Opera: A Long Vision with Imagination, Creativity and Fire, a dance opera" is dedicated to his long-time collaborator, pianist Anthony Davis. Jack DeJohnette brought to the session his composition "Song for World Forgiveness," a powerful plea for peace and sanity that has received a number of different treatments on his own recordings ranging from solo piano and saxophone/piano duo to a quartet, whereas Iyer contributed "Deep Time No.1," which utilizes electronics and includes an excerpt of Malcolm X making his speech "By Any Means Necessary." Finally, the closing piece "Rocket" was created collectively in the studio. "A Love Sonnet For Billie Holiday was a dream project to work on with Jack and Vijay where the idea of composition and instrumentation would play a vital part in how the music sounded," says Wadada Leo Smith. "The keyboards, drum-set/percussion and trumpet would create their own sonic ranges, and with no bass at the 'bottom' of the music, Vijay, Jack and Wadada's instruments could realize wider horizontal sonic fields and emotional ranges. Therefore, the performers could reveal a complete and complex melodic and harmonic spectrum in a clear musical exposition."
