Jazz
Burning Ambulance Music · 25 September 2026
“Dark Matter, Particles of Light, Mirror of the Unseen” takes up 22:06 of the record’s fifty-nine minutes and is its declared centre. It opens with the trio that starts the album (Sylvie Courvoisier on piano, Marcus Gilmore on drums) and grows out into the full octet: Bobby Naughton’s vibraphone, Lamar Smith’s electric guitar, the electric basses of Bill Laswell and Melvin Gibbs, percussion from Mauro Refosco and Brian Jarawa Gray, and Pheeroan akLaff on drums. Players arriving and leaving isn’t something that happens alongside the piece; it is the piece. When the mass is at its thickest, Smith’s trumpet stays up top, in a high register that cuts across the rest without competing with it.
“Dark Energy” (13:53) opens in trio, the trumpet muted and close to plaintive before Courvoisier and Gilmore push it upward. It’s the track that sets the record’s rule: Smith plays little and lets time pass between notes, and the other two fill that space or leave it empty as they see fit.
“Lake Tanganyika” (2:51) is the only short track here, and it works as a hinge. Lamar Smith’s guitar — he is the trumpeter’s grandson — and the double percussion of Refosco and Gray run it, with akLaff on drums, and the colour brightens sharply against what sits either side of it. Under three minutes, placed exactly where the album needed to breathe.
“Deep Canyons On Mars” (13:42) is the most electric piece on the record: Laswell and Gibbs both play electric bass at once, with akLaff, and the pulse comes closer to rock than anywhere else. “Meditation On Love” (6:40) closes in calm, with Naughton’s vibraphone and the percussion, and answers the question the rest of the album poses. Smith has put it this way: “Love is more powerful than light, because love itself is the reason that light is possible.”
The material comes from sessions recorded between 2017 and 2022 with four ensembles (trio, quintet, sextet and octet) and was put together afterwards in the studio, by a method Smith himself calls a collage. He’s eighty-four and has spent half a century turning his way of handling silence into a grammar of its own, which is why the assembly never reads as a salvage job.
Where it does show is in the running order. Three long pieces back to back (13:53, 22:06 and 13:42) with only the 2:51 of “Lake Tanganyika” between the first two leave forty-nine minutes of album working at the same level of density, and the one real change of temperature arrives with six and a half minutes to go. Had “Deep Canyons On Mars” and “Dark Matter” been separated, the middle stretch would ask less of the listener.
Five tracks, fifty-nine minutes, Burning Ambulance Music. The CD is a run of five hundred copies in a gatefold designed by I. A. Freeman, and the vinyl comes out on Kabell, Smith’s own label. 25 September.
Rating: 8.0/10
Text by Aina Torrents