SYLVIE COURVOISIER & WADADA LEO SMITH

ANGEL FALLS

Intakt Records

Wadada Leo Smith, trumpet/composition; Sylvie Courvoisier, piano/composition.

Wadada Leo Smith enjoys recording as a duo with pianists.  I have appreciated his creative merging with a variety of artists including Amina Claudine Myers, Angelica Sanchez, John Tilbury and Vijay Iyer.  Perhaps, it was inevitable that he would suggest a recording with Sylvie Courvoisier.  When they discussed it, Courvoisier suggested they avoid music charts. As a result of that request, the eight tracks on this album “Angel Falls” were recorded freely and uninhibited.

The two artists compliment each other, in a restless, spontaneous kind-of-way.  Both are free spirits and master musicians.  The original songs they sing together offer us continuous calibration and improvisation. They become a conversation between trumpet and piano right from the opening tune, “Old ‘Upnea and Lightning.”  The trumpet takes the lead. Courvoisier’s piano chords fall into place, like rain to a thirsty earth. They both feed and compliment the production.

“The title reflects the world’s highest continuous waterfall in Venezuela,” Courvoisier explains. “I like the image of an angel falling down,” she refers to their album title.

The pianist and trumpeter first played together in 2017 at a concert organized by John Zorn.  After that initial meeting, the two musicians exchanged phone numbers and have played together a hand full of times since that initial meeting.

The two bring artistry that draws from years of performance and decades of composing. Each has mastered the Avant-garde. They let freedom ring, allowing themselves to seek out their hidden most emotional introspection and creativity. Without charts, their music offers a new dimension of freedom and exploration. They listen to each other intently.  The musical conversation is often tentative, sometimes explosive, but always unpredictable. Amazingly, they started recording this project at noon and by 5pm it was mixed, mastered and finished.

“We just played right through exactly the order of the CD, and exactly the amount of music on the CD, with no edits.  We probably did that in two hours,” Sylvie stated proudly.

Composer, trumpeter and author, Wadada Leo Smith is one of the creative music world’s most heralded artists.  Born December 18, 1941, in Mississippi, he grew up steeped in the Southern musical tradition, first performing in Blues bands and then traditional bands. He relocated to Chicago, joined the iconic AACM collective, and began to explore more freedom and Avant-garde exploration of jazz and other genres of music.  The result is what you hear today.

Pianist, composer Sylvie Courvoisier is a Brooklyn-based native of Switzerland.  She won the American Academy of Arts and Letters Music Award in 2025. She is highly capable of balancing the chamber music of her European roots with the Avant-garde jazz scene. Playing in and around NYC for more than two decades, Courvoisier has mastered both European classical music and Jazz, a music heralded as America’s only true musical art form. You hear her handling jazz, the Avant-garde, her European inflections, and a taste of the blues on their song, “Naomi Peak.”

Together, these two amazing musicians present a package of excellence and unique ingenuity.

Reviewed by Dee Dee McNeil

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