Divine Love is the first album Wadada Leo Smith made for ECM, recorded in September 1978 and released the following year. It brings the trumpeter's own method of composing for improvisers into Manfred Eicher's studio, with sound and silence weighed with equal care. Vijay Iyer has called it "one of the greatest recorded works of all time", and its three long pieces remain among the most quietly radical music on the label.
Smith, born in Leland, Mississippi, in 1941, moved to Chicago in 1967 and worked with Anthony Braxton and other members of the AACM. By the 1970s he had developed his notational system and the idea of rhythm-units, in which each sound or phrase stands as a complete event. Here he plays trumpet, flugelhorn, steel-o-phone, gongs and percussion, with Dwight Andrews on alto flute, bass clarinet and tenor saxophone and Bobby Naughton on vibraphone, marimba and bells. Lester Bowie, Kenny Wheeler and Charlie Haden join as guests. The session took place at Tonstudio Bauer in Ludwigsburg with Martin Wieland engineering, and Peter Brötzmann designed the cover.
The title piece, nearly 22 minutes long, drifts through sustained trumpet tones, Naughton's mallet percussion and long silences, each cry seeming to arrive from an uncertain place. Tastalun, dedicated to Bowie, is the shortest and most compact track. Three trumpets meet here, with the two guests on mute cutting into a dense central eddy around Smith. Spirituals: The Language of Love brings in Haden, who plays soulfully on double bass, and returns the music to the open, unhurried sound of the opening.
In a five-star review for The Guardian, John Fordham wrote that Smith's sound "has strong resemblances to that of Miles Davis". He added that Smith had absorbed the bebop trumpet masters and redeployed them in "a bold, vital and often ritualistic setting". On ECM Reviews, Tyran Grillo singles out Andrews's alto flute as the soul of the record.
This CD is the 2019 reissue of ECM 1143 in the Touchstones series, which returns classic albums from the label's catalogue to print in card sleeves. This edition is a four-panel digisleeve with Smith's original liner notes. Divine Love was first released in 1979.
