News & Dates

The Latest News from Wadada

Wadada Leo Smith to Receive Vision Festival’s Lifetime Achievement Award

Trumpeter, multi-instrumentalist, and composer Smith will receive the Vision Festival’s annual award on June 21, 2022. Mr. Smith joins a venerable pantheon of FreeJazz pioneers in receiving the Vision Festival Lifetime Achievement Award including Amina Claudine Myers, Andrew Cyrille, Peter Brotzmann, Henry Grimes, Milford Graves, and Sam Rivers. On this special occasion, Mr. Smith will present new work for the opening… Read More

Legendary composer and trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith Celebrates release of Rosa Parks: Pure Love an Oratorio of Seven Songs

Friday, April 26 – Sunday, April 28, 2019 at The Kitchen in NYC “The trumpeter’s meditation on the legacy of civil rights and the heroism of Rosa Parks is formally inventive and emotionally gripping…. Vividly conveying historical injustice and ongoing struggle through wild instrumental swings and empathetic composition, Rosa Parks is music for the ages.” – Ben Cardew, Pitchfork “Wadada Leo Smith’s intricate… Read More

Wadada Leo Smith performs at Big Ears Festival 2019

Wadada Leo Smith smiling with Big Ears Festival information box at the bottom
At Big Ears 2019, Wadada Leo Smith applies his beautiful, vulnerable trumpet tone to his solo 2017 set, an eight-piece reflection on Thelonious Monk that includes four originals and four Monk interpretations. Though fiercely original, Smith makes his connections to Monk clear as he plays—their respective singular instrumental vocabularies, their idiosyncratic sense of time, their robust personality. This is… Read More