Wadada Leo Smith & Günter Baby Sommer - Wisdom in Time

Intakt 128

Brass and drums make for a seemingly ungainly duo, but when it’s Smith and Sommer fielding the respective instruments the foreignness of the framework swiftly dissipates. Recorded at a Swiss studio in the fall of last year, Wisdom in Time brings the simple adage of its title to aural life. The pair sounds deeply aware of the lineage that extends from Eldridge and Stoller through Dixon and Oxley, bringing with them a collaborative connection that is thirty years young. Sommer is one of the most melodic and orchestrally attuned percussionists on the planet. His project choices are highly selective and this date with Smith is no different, a session positioned for success even before sticks strike skins and lips touch mouthpiece.

Sommer’s all-inclusive kit play commonly alleviates any pangs arising from absent instruments, but in this particular case, a lingering lacuna is palpable. The session carries both formal and extempore dedications to deceased bassist Peter Kowald, with whom the duo worked with as trio. Smith and Sommer achieve a beautiful union throughout the program, engaging in at times near-extrasensory repartee, but it’s difficult not to miss the presence of Kowald and reflect on the magnificence of the trio’s earlier albums for FMP. Mirroring such a ruminative mood, “A Sonic Voice Enclosed in Wind” opens almost like an invocational; Smith’s muted bell spitting out crinkled notes and viscous smears as Sommer shapes fluid accents on chimes, cymbals and snare. “Tarantella Rusticana” moves the two into more song-based structures with Sommer’s symphonic sensibilities given free reign through a series of lush gong washes. His tuneful singing later in the piece weaves in an out of Smith’s crenellated runs and undulating frame drum rhythms.

Smith also dusts off a small battery of electronics to further color the music, holding back in the disc’s first half and waiting to dip into his Milesean bag most fully on the luminous “Woodland Trail to the Giants” and the sci-fi saturated “Rain Cycles”. Throughout the set, Sommer shades with mallets, conches and woodblocks, the peripheral percussion surrounding his kit just as crucial to the pair’s shared concepts as the standard cymbals, snare and toms. He even plays a bit of convincing vaudevillian harmonica on the coda to the aforementioned “Cycles”. As is the Intakt credo, the recording is crisp and vividly rendered with all the nooks and crevices of the music plainly audible. Wherever his spirit now resides, Kowald must be smiling at the musical camaraderie so in evidence between his friends.

~ Derek Taylor