Wadada Leo Smith's Great Lakes Quartet - The Chicago Symphonies [4CD Box Set]

(4-CD box set) The Chicago Symphonies is a magnificent four-CD boxed set by Wadada Leo Smith's Great Lakes Quartet. Each disc includes one of the four symphonies composed by Wadada Leo Smith for this quartet.

The first three symphonies, "Gold Symphony," "Diamond Symphony" and "Pearl Symphony," are performed by Wadada Leo Smith with saxophonist/flutist Henry Threadill, bassist John Lindberg and drummer Jack DeJohnette whereas the fourth, "Sapphire Symphony - The Presidents and Their Visions of America," features Smith with saxophonist Jonathon Haffner, Lindberg and DeJohnette.

Don Cherry's classic recording Symphony For Improvisers on Blue Note Records featured Cherry on the cornet with saxophonists Gato Barbieri and Pharoah Sanders, vibraphonist Karl Berger, bassists Henry Grimes and Jean-François Jenny-Clark, and drummer Ed Blackwell. In The Chicago Symphonies, Wadada Leo Smith has expanded his idea of using symphonic form to showcase some of the Midwest's creative composers/performers, poets, thinkers and political visionaries inside that symphonic form. In particular, The Chicago Symphonies celebrate the historical contributions of creative music in Chicago culture starting with Louis Armstrong and his contemporaries through Sun Ra and others onto the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) as well as, in the case of "Sapphire Symphony," two great presidents hailing from Chicago, Abraham Lincoln and Barack Hussein Obama.

The Chicago Symphonies follows the release by the Great Lakes Quartet of The Great Lakes Suites (TUM CD 041-2, a double-CD with Smith, Threadgill, Lindberg and DeJohnette) that featured six extended compositions dedicated by Smith to Lake Michigan, Lake Ontario, Lake Superior, Laker Huron, Lake Erie and Lake St. Clair. In 2014, The Great Lakes Suites was broadly hailed as one of the top albums of the year.