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In the Japanese martial arts partner- practice known as kumite, the notions of leader and follower or attacker and receiver sometimes dissolve into an undifferentiated flow. Such is the tao of Celestial Weather. Longtime collaborators Wadada Leo Smith, the 74-year-old trumpeter who came to prominence in the Chicago avant- garde, and John Lindberg, the 56-year- old bassist of the String Trio of New York who played extensively with Anthony Braxton in the 1980s, erase the boundaries of conventional give- and-take or call-and-response on this studio recording. While their instruments could hardly sound more different—the mercurial brassiness and sputtering of Smith’s horn and the sonorous snapping, throbbing, and groaning of Lindberg’s double bass—they virtually become one as they bob, weave, and grapple. The performances are arranged in three segments, opening with Smith’s two-part “Malachi Favors Maghostut—A Monarch of Creative Music,” moving into the jointly composed, “Celestial Weather Suite,” and concluding with Lindberg’s “Feathers and Earth.” Listening to these two master instrumentalists tune into each other and merge their attentiveness into a single creative statement is itself a meditation, but a musical one above all else.
By Derk Richardson
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