E-Mail This Article to a Friend Hat trick A trio of triumphs for Wadada Leo Smith BY ED HAZELL

If there’s such a thing as systematic intuition, trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith has it. He plays the right note at the right time so often, it can’t be accidental. His methodically intuitive powers are featured on three recent releases showcasing the trumpeter/composer in radically different settings. On Sky Garden (Cuneiform), by Yo Miles!, a band he leads with guitarist Henry Kaiser, Smith pays tribute to the jazz funk of Miles Davis. The Sweetness of the Water (Thirsty Ear) features Smith and three English free-improvisers working with drum ’n’ bass duo Spring Heel Jack. Kabell Years: 1971-1979 (Tzadik) reissues the historic LPs on which Smith first established the principles that guide his music. Despite their differences, there’s no mistaking his voice on any of them.

Smith’s style is distinct in part because he’s resisted the exclusive influence of any one system of music and built his own, which he calls Ankrasmation. Sometimes Western notation appears in his scores, but often he defines the music’s components with geometric shapes, numbers, and colors. To perform them, musicians must draw on non-traditional techniques, integrating their imagination to improvise within the structure. "This is my pride and joy as a creative artist," Smith says. "It’s a language that I’m continuously aware of and using it whenever I play. I’ve always used a systemic approach to music, from the very first Kabell records forward."

The hallmarks of Smith’s systematized spontaneity — the carefully calculated use of silence, the precisely calibrated use of tone color, the oblique melodies that distill Miles Davis, Don Cherry, and Louis Armstrong into a personal voice — are indeed evident on those initial self-produced LPs. Tzadik’s reissue restores the entire Kabell catalogue — two solo trumpet albums and two small band albums — along with more than two hours of previously unissued material. Pianist Anthony Davis and bassist Wes Brown are featured on Reflectativity, a work in which melody, texture, and color emerge with stunning force from a charged silence. Smith’s solo trumpet recordings are also daring in their use of space, stretching continuity without sacrificing structure. The newly released recordings include solo and group tracks that make this one of the major jazz reissues of the year.

Smith’s idiosyncratic feel for rhythm and silence dominates Sky Garden, the first of two projected double-CD sets of music from and inspired by Miles’s electric decades. On "Great Expectations," his soft growls, lyrical fragments, smears, and needle-thin tones fall into an elusive synchronization with the tabla playing of Zakir Hussain. Smith’s inner drum guides his note placement on "Jabali (part 1)" as he fits into the rhythm section’s multi-layered groove. On the group improv "Cosey Pete," he guides long, prickly lines, funky asides, and meditative coloristic passages that flow with, over, and around the surging rhythms. Half the disc is dedicated to Smith’s own compositions, and it’s a tribute to the flexibility of his music that his concepts fit the setting without losing their character. Saxophonists Greg Osby and John Tchicai also solo tellingly on several tracks. Don’t mistake this album for a re-creation — it’s too personal and too focused on exploring the possibilities of Davis’s jazz-funk forms.

Spring Heel Jack’s Sweetness of the Water — one of the best entries in the Blue Series, which pairs hip-hop and electronic dance artists with improvisers — presents an altogether different context. Smith, saxophonist Evan Parker, bassist John Edwards, and drummer Mark Sanders play along to pre-recorded and processed improvisations by ambient jungle duo John Coxon and Ashley Wales. Smith’s notes and unpitched sounds land with an emotional weight that’s made heavier by the relative sparseness of his playing. On "Track Two," he swells and subsides with Edwards and Sanders in a slow tidal movement. "With Spring Heel Jack, that space has already a sonic character in it," he points out. "If there is a series of sounds on the tape, I choose a pitch that’s not there and affect that pitch in a way that it actually brings out and enriches the sound that I’m trying to map with."

After decades of perfecting and systemizing his ability to "map with" the music around him, Smith describes his approach in terms that sound more religious than musical — and in many respects, for him there’s no distinction between the two. "The most perfect space for playing music is beyond hate and love, where none of those things could affect you, where your whole demeanor is as perfect as it can possibly be at that moment — without judgment. And if one practices that, you end up with your body and mind all ready to respond, to find the appropriate pitch to select. And you trust it."