American master trumpeter, composer, and improviser Wadada Leo Smith’s Constellations and Hemispheres was recorded between 2017 and 2022 with four different ensembles (just like Smith’s previous album, Fire Illuminations, released on Smith’s label, Kabell, 2023), but with a common spiritual-cosmic-astronomical theme: light and the movement of light through the universe. Smith was always an unconventional musical thinker and composer whose projects addressed grand and complex issues, and explored worlds and philosophies beyond our immediate experience.
“Light is a revealer,” Smith (b. 1941) explains. “People refer to it as an exposer of truth. It shows things that are hidden and concealed. My major journey through the planet as an artist has been to reveal how unusual it is that the human beings on this little
