Wadada Leo Smith to Release CONSTELLATIONS AND HEMISPHERES Album

Constellations And Hemispheres, the new album from composer, trumpeter and author Wadada Leo Smith, will be released September 25, 2026 on CD and digitally through Burning Ambulance Music, with an LP release to follow via Smith's own Kabell label.

The album features music by four different ensembles, recorded between 2017 and 2022: a trio with pianist Sylvie Courvoisier and drummer Marcus Gilmore; a quintet with vibraphonist Bobby Naughton, bassists Bill Laswell and Melvin Gibbs, and drummer Pheeroan akLaff; a sextet with guitarist Lamar Smith, Naughton, akLaff, and percussionists Brian Jarawa Gray and Mauro Refosco; and an octet featuring Naughton, Lamar Smith, Gibbs, Laswell, akLaff, Gray, and Refosco.

Constellations And Hemispheres contains music from multiple sessions combined and recontextualized through studio post-production. While most tracks feature just one group, the album's centerpiece, the 22-minute suite 'Dark Matter, Particles of Light, Mirror of the Unseen' shifts from trio to octet and back. In its collage-like approach to the studio, the album can be heard as a sequel or companion piece to Smith's digital-only 2023 release, Fire Illuminations.

In approaching this latest project, Smith took as his guiding inspiration the movement of light through the universe. As the composer explains, 'Light has a consistent flow. Whatever it encounters, light either goes through it or around it or under it, but it never stops its flow. That's the concept of light. I wanted to represent by assembling different ensembles in a horizontal fashion.'

With his post-production work, Smith traces a spiritual and creative connection to the Rastafarians in Jamaica who shaped reggae music, and through them to cultures across the globe who 'have looked at the studio as being a vehicle for how they shape a piece of music. The studio allows you to see a much bigger picture than the view of the inner layers that you get when performing in the ensemble.'

Like its cosmic and astronomical inspirations, the music of Constellations and Hemispheres is expansive and mysterious, suggesting worlds and philosophies beyond immediate experience. Although the interstellar subjects of dark matter, canyons on Mars, light particles and dark energy seem to soar beyond Smith's concerns with the natural environment and human concerns that illuminate much of his work, he argues that the concepts are all of a piece.

'Light is a revealer,' he explains. 'People refer to it as an exposer of truth. It shows things that are hidden and concealed. My major journey through the planet as an artist has been to reveal how unusual it is that the human beings on this little planet cannot find enough space to live together without war. My most certain belief is that we will have war until we understand love.'

To that end, the album concludes in inner rather than outer space, with the stark and contemplative 'Meditation on Love.'

'Love is more powerful than light,' Smith explains, 'because love itself is the reason that light is possible.'

Composer, trumpeter and author Wadada Leo Smith is one of the creative music world's most heralded artists. Born December 18, 1941 in Leland, MS, he grew up steeped in the musical traditions of the South performing in Delta Blues and other traditional bands, eventually moving to Chicago where he joined the legendary AACM collective. Smith defines his music as 'Creative Music,' and his diverse discography reveals a recorded history of music centered in the idea of spiritual harmony and the unification of social and cultural issues of his world. Among his major recordings are Ten Freedom Summers, America's National Parks and String Quartets Nos. 1-12. A finalist for the 2013 Pulitzer Prize in Music, Smith has received numerous other awards and honors including a 2016 Doris Duke Artist Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Hammer Museum's 2016 Mohn Award for Career Achievement 'honoring brilliance and resilience,' the UCLA Medal, the University's highest honor, and the 2022 Vision Festival's Lifetime Achievement Award, among many others. He was selected as a 2021 United States Artists' USA Fellow and named a 2022 Mellon Arts & Practitioner Fellow at the Yale Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity and Transnational Migration. In 2023 he was selected for induction into the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

An esteemed educator, from 1994–2013 Smith was on the faculty at The Herb Alpert School of Music at California Institute of the Arts, where he served as director of the African-American Improvisational Music program. He continues to give workshops and master classes worldwide and recently served as the Spring 2024 Fromm Foundation Visiting Lecturer on Music at Harvard University.

Constellations And Hemispheres will be released digitally and as a limited edition of 500 CDs in heavy-duty gatefold mini-LP sleeves from Stoughton Printing. The cover art and design are by Burning Ambulance co-founder I.A. Freeman.

Burning Ambulance is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit founded by journalist and author Philip Freeman and visual artist I.A. Freeman in 2010. Since 2021, they have released 19 albums by artists including Anthony Braxton, Cecil Taylor, Ivo Perelman, Matthew Shipp, Graham Haynes, Ava Mendoza, and more.

Tracklist

1. Dark Energy (13:53)

2. Lake Tanganyika (2:51)

3. Dark Matter, Particles of Light, Mirror of the Unseen (22:06)

4. Deep Canyons on Mars (13:42)

5. Meditation on Love (6:40)

Photo Credit: Phil Penman

Don't Miss a Music News Story
Sign up for all the news on the Summer season, discounts & more...