(Modern Creative / Post-Bop / World Fusion) Wadada Leo Smith / Adam Rudolph - Compassion - 2006, FLAC (image+.cue), lossless

Long-time occasional collaborators Wadada Leo Smith and Adam Rudolph perform improvised/composed duets from a 2002 performance live at Venice's Electric Lodge on Compassion, newly released on Rudolph's Meta Records. Both are masters of their mediums: Rudolph plays a variety of percussion instruments and at least one wind instrument to sonically shade, color, and texturize; Smith uses trumpet and flugelhorn in conventional and extended ways to complement him. With improvisers of this depth, the journey takes many unexpected turns, all rewarding.
The spacious and exotic Beauty: Aquamarine Night allows each musician to display subtlety and understatement while interacting with unhurried delicacy. Rudolph blows a double-reed instrument fanfare on "Sun Ray Colors and Rainbow Images, with Smith's flugelhorn circulating. Returning to percussion, Rudolph marks silence with gong flares, scratches, and shakers as Smith slides around the rich toned flugelhorn. "Fragrance of Light finds the percussionist offering a brief glimpse of his remarkable skill on hand drums, while Smith blows muted and clear toned trumpet jet trails.
Adding his distinctive vocalese chant to propulsive drumming, Rudolph simmers on the skins while Smith essays a scorching musical thread on Love Rhythms, Heart Songs. Smith leads the "Song of Humanity, a reedy introspective muted meditation complimented by Rudolph's melodic drum work. Appropriately, "The Caller and the Called finds Smith in full voice, hitting gorgeous tones with congas resonating. Part two is pure Codona: Rudolph maintains a pulse on the rhythmic dousn'goni; Smith is more muscular than Cherry, but still a muted brass butterfly.
At the end of May, Rudolph again takes the stage at the Electric Lodge, this time with his large ensemble, the Go: Organic Orchestra, a who's who of gifted artists augmented by drop in guest stars, a self-contained jazz festival. These prolific musicians have much to say to each other, and us. ~ Rex Butters, AAJ

This is a unique CD, just trumpet and percussion. Wadada Leo Smith and Adam Rudolph both belong to the free jazz avant-garde, masters with great technical skill, unafraid to search for entirely new forms of expression, but always with a strong spiritual element into it. This kind of initiative often fails because the music itself suffers from this search for new form. Smith and Rudolph have both made albums for which you really need open ears in order to be able to endure the music till the end of the album at one stretch. On the other hand both have also already issued beautiful CDs with relative accessibility (Smith : Kulture Jazz, Rudolph & Pharoah Sanders : Spirits).
Compassion is again a spiritual journey, starting with lonely and voiceless stuttering by the trumpet, soon joined by slight percussion, like the sounds of the night. The second piece brings us dawn, and as the sun breaks through we get the long notes of Smith's trumpet, supported by Tibetan bells and gongs of Rudolph. This is a quite intimistic kind of improvisation without any preconceived structure, but with an authentic joint search to subdued beauty and emotional expression. On Fragrance of Light, Rudolph a changing rhythm on the framedrums, with great improvisation by Wadada. The pièce-de-resistance is the long "Love Rhythms, Heart Songs", on which Rudolph also sings, sometimes in overtone. On the last piece, The Caller and The Called, Rudolph digs up his dousn' gouni and we get sounds that remind us of Codona with Nana Vasconcelos and Don Cherry. This is music which will not directly appeal to those who expect clear melodies, structure and harmonic changes. It is in any case no mellow new-age emptiness, because despite the minimalistic line-up, the music is exciting from beginning to end, and the focus of both musicians is clearly kept on the creation of a coherent musical journey. Highly recommended. ~ Free Jazz Blog

Exact Audio Copy V0.99 prebeta 4 from 23. January 2008
EAC extraction logfile from 15. May 2010, 12:30
Wadada Leo Smith / Adam Rudolph / Compassion
Used drive  : TSSTcorpCD/DVDW SH-S182M   Adapter: 2  ID: 0
Read mode               : Secure
Utilize accurate stream : Yes
Defeat audio cache      : Yes
Make use of C2 pointers : No
Read offset correction                      : 6
Overread into Lead-In and Lead-Out          : No
Fill up missing offset samples with silence : Yes
Delete leading and trailing silent blocks   : No
Null samples used in CRC calculations       : Yes
Used interface                              : Installed external ASPI interface
Used output format              : User Defined Encoder
Selected bitrate                : 1024 kBit/s
Quality                         : High
Add ID3 tag                     : No
Command line compressor         : C:\Program Files\Exact Audio Copy\Flac\flac.exe
Additional command line options : -6 -V -T "ARTIST=%a" -T "TITLE=%t" -T "ALBUM=%g" -T "DATE=%y" -T "TRACKNUMBER=%n" -T "GENRE=%m" -T "COMMENT=EAC FLAC -6" %s
TOC of the extracted CD
     Track |   Start  |  Length  | Start sector | End sector
    ---------------------------------------------------------
        1  |  0:00.00 |  3:40.12 |         0    |    16511
        2  |  3:40.12 | 10:24.00 |     16512    |    63311
        3  | 14:04.12 |  3:16.55 |     63312    |    78066
        4  | 17:20.67 | 13:11.23 |     78067    |   137414
        5  | 30:32.15 |  4:35.55 |    137415    |   158094
        6  | 35:07.70 |  7:19.02 |    158095    |   191021
        7  | 42:26.72 |  4:48.59 |    191022    |   212680
Range status and errors
Selected range
     Filename C:\Users\Igor\Music\eac\Wadada Leo Smith & Adam Rudolph - Compassion.wav
     Peak level 99.4 %
     Range quality 100.0 %
     Test CRC 4FD2182B
     Copy CRC 4FD2182B
     Copy OK
No errors occurred
AccurateRip summary
Track  1  accurately ripped (confidence 2)  [D0559A4E]
Track  2  accurately ripped (confidence 2)  [82752C9F]
Track  3  accurately ripped (confidence 2)  [91918CAA]
Track  4  accurately ripped (confidence 2)  [254D4D33]
Track  5  accurately ripped (confidence 2)  [03477B29]
Track  6  accurately ripped (confidence 2)  [DCEC5EEF]
Track  7  accurately ripped (confidence 2)  [04ECB3B9]
All tracks accurately ripped
End of status report