Central Park sits like a monster footprint in the middle of Manhattan, ringed with towers, green and verdant, but hard to mistake for wilderness. Such an imposing infrastructure project is addressed to Wadada Leo Smith. The great AACM trumpeter and composer's releases since 2012 Ten summers of freedom features an alternate map of America, lovingly sketching the Great Lakes and National Parks, while honoring civil rights leaders, artistic geniuses, and the millions who were displaced and killed in its creation. Smith composed six of the seven tracks Central Park mosaics of reservoir, lake, paths and gardens, He is joined by pianist and AACM group Amina Claudine Myers, who completed the sessions without prior rehearsal. Smith describes Central Park as his favorite park in the world, but from the opening notes of the minor-key piano in “Conservatory Gardens,” it's clear that Mosaics they are more than bucolic landscapes.
The tone is commanding and almost elegiac throughout, as if a grand, seismic and vaguely terrifying event is taking place on a glacial scale. Myers broods in the lower octaves, providing the foundation through which Smith's horn cuts through the landscape like a river—or like a path through a garden, or like the park itself through the canyons of Manhattan's skyscrapers. It's a treat when her hands dance freely in the higher registers, as in the final minute of her gorgeous piano solo “When Was,” but she and Smith largely move at a deliberate pace. It could work as ambient music if Smith's sharp tone didn't dominate the mix so well. Its first appearance in “Conservatory Gardens” after more than a minute of suggestive piano intervals by Myers is a sudden shock on a first listen.
Mosaics he is interested in both the park's human history and its natural beauty. One of the longest and most beautiful tracks on the relatively short record is “Albert Ayler, a Meditation on Light,” in which the spirit of the late free-jazz icon apparently inspired the more relaxed and enjoyable interplay between the two. “Imagine, a mosaic for John Lennon” is (thankfully) not a cover of “Imagine” but an extension of the album's air of shimmering mystery. The spot near Central Park where Lennon died is a popular pilgrimage site for Beatles fans. The album's somber tone suggests an awareness of the millions of lives and deaths that make up New York's past, the sheer density of human history that can be felt in every square inch of the city.
In exploring a relatively small section of New York as a microcosm of its complexity, Smith and Myers' album is akin in spirit to Loren Connors' stunning solo guitar albums Hell's Kitchen Park and 9th Ave, which channeled the disappearing Irish-American history of Manhattan's gritty Hell's Kitchen neighborhood. Like these albums, Mosaics is short, only 36 minutes, more than a quarter of which is taken up by the “Conservatory Gardens”. But it doesn't seem small, even when compared to Smith's almost impossibly ambitious epics, like the Pulitzer-nominated four-and-a-half-hour Ten summers of freedom. Its borders seem to stretch beyond its borders, as if there is a theoretical piece for every meadow and lake in Central Park and this is just a small leak from a vast parallel universe rendered through music.
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