#lamar smith

Instead, the EPA took a meeting with the American Chemistry Council’s Formaldehyde Panel. The American Chemistry Council “spent more than $7 million last year lobbying EPA and Congress on issues including ... formaldehyde.” The Panel argued against release of the formaldehyde report, not because it was wrong, but because nearly a million jobs “depend on the use of formaldehyde.”

“As stated in our meeting, a premature release of a draft assessment … will cause irreparable harm to the companies represented by the Panel and to the many companies and jobs that depend on the broad use of the chemical.”

The top staffer for the Formaldehyde Panel, Kimberly Wise White, has repeatedly lobbied the EPA to “incorporate industry-funded research that found no link between formaldehyde and leukemia,” and argued that those industry-funded studies “shifted the scientific consensus away from the conclusion that it does.” (You might recognize White’s name. Last year, Pruitt kicked all of the academic scientists off the EPA’s science advisory board and replaced them with people representing the industries the EPA is supposed to regulate. White was one of Pruitt’s appointees. She’s still lobbying the EPA, and her creative interpretation of “consensus” squares exactly with Pruitt’s own interpretation of a supposed lack of “consensus” on climate change. But I digress.)

Pruitt’s EPA deferred to the Council’s desire to put their corporate profits above the health and safety of U.S. citizens. Some officials have now come forward to confirm the reason the EPA is blocking the formaldehyde report’s release:

“Top advisers to departing Administrator Scott Pruitt are delaying its release as part of a campaign to undermine the agency’s independent research into the health risks of toxic chemicals.”

And although Pruitt may have resigned, don’t expect better progress under the EPA’s new acting director, Andrew Wheeler:

“As staff director for the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee in 2004, Wheeler worked to delay an earlier version of the EPA’s formaldehyde analysis – and went on to profitable career as chemical industry lobbyist.”

The National Academies of Sciences, an independent panel of the country’s top scientists, must weigh in on all EPA risk assessments. This is the highest level of scrutiny a scientific study can receive. And the EPA has already paid the Academies $500,000 for that review. But the work cannot start until the EPA sends the study; blocking its release prevents the review.

Describing Smith’s work is as intimidating as hearing it is enlightening. Tracing his diverse yet unified development from those Kabell years through recent releases on a multitude of labels, a sense of the musician as sculptor emerges with startling clarity. In Laswell’s hands, Najwa’s five portraits are as finely chiseled as anything from 1971’s Creative Music. The title piece’s juxtaposition of lush sustains, plucked pointillisms and spacious trumpet exhortations tells the whole story in a three-minute distillation, sliding in and out of existence with a nostalgic flicker. Smith’s Billie Holiday tribute, “The Empress, Lady Day: In a Rainbow Garden, with Yellow-Gold Hot Springs, Surrounded by Exotic Plants and Flowers,” is constructed in similar fashion but with more layers. In both cases, the ever-morphing and heavily reverbed and delayed sustains anchor everything from sound stage’s center, trumpet radiating outward slightly in soft focus, while the guitars reside up close, dotting the soundstage at various points across the spectrum. On “Empress,” akLaff’s drums embrace everything in wide and slow dances of metal and skin, the bite and ring of cymbals complementing each string and drone as it slides by. Smith’s trumpet phrasing captures Lady Day’s behind the beat aesthetic with uncanny perfection, making this his most complex and effective portrait of the great vocalist and one of the most moving to have been recorded.  

The other pieces sport sections of stone groove and cosmic quasi-repetition, spacy sounds merging to create a near-stillness amidst multifarious pulse and syncopation. These mini-suites, as Smith labels them, may have their genesis in the briefer but equally changeable structures of one of their dedicatees. “Ohnedaruth John Coltrane: The Master of Cosmic Music and his Spirituality in A Love Supreme” consists of two grooves separated by a section of airy electric rhythmic concision, dead center in the sound field. The grooves support everything from slow funk to all-out guitar squall, but expert mixing ensures that not a single detail is lost as a constantly evolving layer of drums and percussion create what Coltrane would have called multi-directional rhythms.  

Smith’s compositions continue to inhabit a space somewhere between celestial beauty and raw earthy power. His ecstatic paean to Ronald Shannon Jackson is as visceral as anything Jackson himself committed to tape, and the opening melody of Smith’s Ornette Coleman homage evokes shades of Coleman’s intervallically complex heads. To hear the Coleman suite as it moves from explosive energy toward serenity is to experience the unfolding of creative music at its finest. Smith inhabits the worlds heralded by these pioneering voices while expanding, blurring and dissolving their boundaries. His playing presents nuance and feeling akin to every step along each compositional path. I can’t help but think of post-1950 Stravinsky when considering the consistency of Smith’s recent work. Each ensemble, electric or otherwise, becomes orchestral in the most innovative sense, avoiding cliché while relishing its implications. Long may it continue.