February 15, 7:30pm
The Red Canteen at Matilija (formerly Matilija Middle School)
703 El Paseo Road, Ojai, CA
The Ojai Music Festival presents a Creative Lab concert on February 15, 7:30pm, featuring legendary trumpeter and composer Wadada Leo Smith with the RedKoral string quartet. The concert will be at The Red Canteen at Matilija, a black-box space, at the former Matilija Middle School. The Festival’s Creative Lab concert events launched in 2023 and features a series of performances at various locations in and around Ojai, which align artistically with the Ojai Festival and are between the flagship June weekend.
The one-night only performance, in partnership with the Ventura College Department of Performing Arts and VC’s Schwab Academy of Music, will feature the world premiere of Smith’s String Quartet No. 19, Central Park: Seneca Village NYC, a Paradise: the Hallett Nature Sanctuary, The Women’s Rights Statue; and The Egyptian Obelisk in Central Park NYC, a work for strings and trumpet in five movements, drawing inspiration from his experiences and reflections in Central Park in New York City.
General Admission tickets for the Creative Lab on February 15 are “pay-what-you-can” with a suggested price of $25. There will be a complimentary pre-concert mixer for the audience members.
READ PROGRAM NOTES
String Quartet No. 19, Central Park: Seneca Village NYC, a Paradise: the Hallett Nature Sanctuary, The Women’s Rights Statue; and The Egyptian Obelisk in Central Park NYC
Central Park was the first landscaped public park in the United States. Advocates of creating the park–primarily wealthy merchants and landowners–admired the public grounds of London and Paris and urged that New York needed a comparable facility to establish its international reputation. In 1853 the state legislature authorized the City of New York to use the power of eminent domain to acquire more than 700 acres of land in the center of Manhattan.
An irregular terrain of swamps and bluffs, punctuated by rocky outcroppings, made the land between Fifth and Eighth avenues and 59th and 106th streets undesirable for private development. Creating the park, however, required displacing roughly 1,600 poor residents, including Irish pig farmers and German gardeners, who lived in shanties on the site. At Eighth Avenue and 82nd Street, Seneca Village had been one of the city’s most stable African-American settlements, with three churches and a school. The extension of the boundaries to 110th Street in 1863 brought the park to its current 843 acres.
Movement 1 – Central Park at Sunset, Summer
Movement 2 – A Paradise: The Hallett Nature Sanctuary, a (pure multi-sonic drone)
Movement 3 – Seneca Village: an African American Community, 1825-1857
Movement 4 – The Women’s Rights Statue
Movement 5 – The Obelisk in Central Park NYC, 1881 from Pharaoh Thutmose III, Eighteenth Dynasty Egypt
For over 20 years, I have been meditating and reflecting on the nature of New York’s Central Park. I first heard Charles Ives’s, Central Park In The Dark, and much later John Lewis’s, Skating in Central Park. I have been fascinated with this park. Sometimes, on a beautiful night in my early days living in the city, I would take a taxi ride through the Park. Years later, I had a friend who lived in Harlem and her place was a ten minute walk to Central Park, near the Harlem Meer.
I would walk to the park two or three times a week. The Meer, with its ducks, geese, and white lotus plants, and the Conservatory Garden, with its paved walkways and tree branches cascading above, both became my favorite spots to sit and reflect on nature and life.
When I was commissioned to compose a composition, I selected the spirit of Central Park as my compositional inquiry. Through research, I learned about the park’s unique history. The title of the work is Central Park in August (in four movements.)
I completed the score in 2007 in Ventura, California. The music was recorded in 2023 with double ensembles and is currently unreleased.
In 2021, I started to compose the work as a suite in six parts for trumpet and piano, centered on the places I knew and loved in Central Park.
The music for Central Park’s Mosaics, Reservoirs, Lake, Paths and Gardens was recorded in 2022 and released through Red Hook Records in 2024.
String Quartet No. 19 – The New Project
The third and latest installment of music is centered around five places in Central Park and is composed for string quartet and trumpet with five movements.
The first movement of the quartet has the same name as the first movement of trumpet and piano suites, however there are some key differences. While the movement employs the same melodic elements and has a similar feeling as the original trumpet
and piano version, it is orchestrated differently and composed with new instrumental textures and a larger horizontal expansion that the duo didn’t have. These changes make this first movement, Central Park at Sunset, a new work and not an arrangement or recomposed score.
I began work on String Quartet No. 19 on October 23, 2024 in New Haven, Connecticut. Between the time I started until November 1, 2024, I had composed three and a half movements within that time. I was able to compose this work with rapid speed because I wrote it in pencil and the ideas could be captured very quickly. Writing in pencil allows me to create musical elements spontaneously. The final stage of my compositional process is putting these ideas, originally in pencil, into score form with ink.
– Wadada Leo Smith, composer
Artist & Composer Bios
Wadada Leo Smith
Born on December 18, 1941 in Leland, Mississippi, Wadada Leo Smith began his musical journey steeped in the musical traditions of the South. He composed his first piece of music at the age of twelve, and at thirteen started performing with Delta Blues and other traditional bands. In high school he played in and served as assistant director of the concert and marching bands under the direction of Mr. Henderson Howard.
Smith received his formal musical education from his stepfather, composer/guitarist Alex “Little Bill” Wallace, one of the pioneers of electric guitar in Delta Blues. He was further educated through the U.S. Military band program at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri (1963); Sherwood School of Music (1967-69); and Wesleyan University (1975-76). He has researched a variety of music cultures, including African, Japanese, Indonesian, European and American.
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.
He has created Ankhrasmation, a symbolic image-based language for performers or musicians. He started his research and designs in search of Ankhrasmation in 1965, and his first realization of this language was in 1967, when it was illustrated in the recording of The Bell (Anthony Braxton: ‘Three Compositions of New Jazz’). Ankhrasmation has played a significant role in Wadada’s development as an artist, ensemble leader and educator.
Smith’s Ankhrasmation language scores have been exhibited in major American museums including The Renaissance Society at The University of Chicago, which in October 2015 presented the first comprehensive exhibition of these language scores. In 2016, the Hammer Museum’s ‘Made in L.A.’ exhibition featured the scores and presented Smith with the Mohn Award for Career Achievement honoring “brilliance and resilience.” His scores have also been shown at the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts in Michigan, the Kadist Art Foundation in San Francisco, The Museum of Rhythm Łódź, Poland and the Clemente Gallery in NYC.
RedKoral
RedKoral is a string quartet devoted to playing the music of the legendary composer and trumpeter, Wadada Leo Smith. Their recordings include Smith’s String Quartets 1-12 on a 7-CD box set and his Rosa Parks: Pure Love. An Oratorio of Seven Songs.
RedKoral has performed live with Smith at festivals and concerts in Europe, Brazil, and throughout the United States, including in Chicago, Washington D.C, Los Angeles, Austin, New Orleans, Houston, and Tuscaloosa. Performance highlights include performances over several years of Smith’s iconic work, Ten Freedom Summers, two evenings dedicated solely to Smith’s quartets at Monday Evening Concerts in Los Angeles in 2022, Smith’s America Transformed at Brooklyn College in 2023, and a performance at the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2024. RedKoral’s members are: Shalini Vijayan, violin; Mona Tian, violin; Andrew McIntosh, viola; and Ashley Walters, cello.