Legendary composer, trumpeter and author Wadada Leo Smith returns with Constellations And Hemispheres, an expansive new studio album that brings together music recorded across five years and four distinct ensembles. The album arrives September 25, 2026, on CD and digitally through Burning Ambulance Music, with an LP edition to follow on Smith’s own Kabell label.
Recorded between 2017 and 2022, Constellations And Hemispheres features Smith working with an extraordinary roster of musicians, including pianist Sylvie Courvoisier, drummer Marcus Gilmore, vibraphonist Bobby Naughton, bassists Bill Laswell and Melvin Gibbs, drummer Pheeroan akLaff, guitarist Lamar Smith and percussionists Brian Jarawa Gray and Mauro Refosco.
The album brings together a trio, quintet, sextet and octet, with Smith using studio post-production to combine and recontextualize material from the various sessions. The centerpiece is the 22-minute “Dark Matter, Particles of Light, Mirror of the Unseen,” an expansive suite that moves between the trio and octet formations before ultimately returning to the smaller ensemble.
In this collage-like approach, Smith continues the studio experimentation explored on his 2023 digital release Fire Illuminations. Rather than treating the recording studio simply as a place to document performances, Smith views it as another compositional instrument—one capable of revealing relationships between musicians, sounds and ideas that may not be possible within a single live ensemble.
The album’s guiding concept is the movement of light through the universe. Smith describes light as having a constant flow, moving through, around or beneath whatever it encounters without ever stopping. He sought to represent that idea by assembling his different ensembles “in a horizontal fashion,” allowing the music to move organically across different configurations.
The cosmic imagery of the album—dark matter, light particles, dark energy and the canyons of Mars—ultimately leads back to Smith’s longstanding interest in humanity, nature, spirituality and social consciousness. For the composer, light is not simply an astronomical phenomenon but a force of revelation, illuminating what is hidden and exposing truths about the world and the people living in it.
That philosophical journey reaches its emotional destination with “Meditation on Love,” the album’s closing piece. After exploring the vastness of the universe, Smith turns inward, suggesting that love itself may be an even more powerful force than light.
“Love is more powerful than light,” Smith explains, “because love itself is the reason that light is possible.”
Smith’s career has long been defined by this intersection of music, spirituality and social thought. Born in Leland, Mississippi, in 1941, he grew up performing in Delta Blues and traditional bands before moving to Chicago and becoming part of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM). He later developed his own concept of “Creative Music,” creating a vast body of work centered on spiritual harmony, improvisation and the relationship between social and cultural experience.
His landmark recordings include Ten Freedom Summers, America’s National Parks and String Quartets Nos. 1-12. A finalist for the 2013 Pulitzer Prize in Music, Smith has received numerous honors, including a Doris Duke Artist Award, Guggenheim Fellowship, Hammer Museum Mohn Award for Career Achievement, UCLA Medal and the Vision Festival Lifetime Achievement Award. He was also named a United States Artists USA Fellow and a Mellon Arts & Practitioner Fellow at Yale, and in 2023 was selected for induction into the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
An esteemed educator as well as a performer and composer, Smith served on the faculty of the Herb Alpert School of Music at California Institute of the Arts from 1994 to 2013, where he directed the African-American Improvisational Music program. He continues to teach workshops and master classes internationally and served as the Spring 2024 Fromm Foundation Visiting Lecturer on Music at Harvard University.
Constellations And Hemispheres will be available digitally and as a limited edition of 500 CDs housed in heavy-duty gatefold mini-LP sleeves manufactured by Stoughton Printing. Cover art and design are by Burning Ambulance co-founder I.A. Freeman.
The album’s five-track sequence is:
- “Dark Energy” — 13:53
- “Lake Tanganyika” — 2:51
- “Dark Matter, Particles of Light, Mirror of the Unseen” — 22:06
- “Deep Canyons on Mars” — 13:42
- “Meditation on Love” — 6:40
With Constellations And Hemispheres, Wadada Leo Smith once again transforms improvisation into a vehicle for deeper contemplation, moving from the immense scale of the cosmos toward the most human of subjects. It is music about light, mystery, connection and ultimately the possibility of finding a way for humanity to live together.
Constellations And Hemispheres arrives September 25, 2026, through Burning Ambulance Music.
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