As he stated himself in the pages of Jazzwise last year, Wadada Leo Smith’s productivity has only increased amid the disruption of the past few years and this latest pair of releases emphatically bears that out.

As has been the case with much of the 80 year-old trumpeter’s output, the music is predicated on the recognition of significant sources of inspiration. The first of the two offerings, A Love Sonnet For Billie Holiday hails the great singer who affected the lives of countless players while the second, The Chicago Symphonies, a 4-CD box set, pays tribute to the myriad musical and political visionaries who have defined the Windy city, from Anthony Braxton and Muhal Richard Abrams to Abraham Lincoln and Barack Obama.

Each release is markedly different, but there are common denominators, not least the presence of drummer Jack DeJohnette, who is deeply impressive for his versatility, providing a dynamic, often explosive momentum to some of the pieces and advanced understatement on others, as if his cymbals were a gentle breeze rustling through the open landscape created by Smith and others such as pianist Vijay Iyer (Billie Holiday) and alto saxophonist Henry Threadgill (Chicago Symphonies). The depth of Smith’s creative world is such that the sounds produced in whatever context he chooses fit into a wider network of word and image, often with poetic leanings, and the title of each disc of the box set as a jewel – Gold, Diamond, Pearl, Sapphire – reinforces not just the audio-visual sub-text of the work but the sense of grandeur and beauty that Smith assigns to his subjects.

The dazzle and the darkness of these precious stones are vividly conveyed by compositions in which themes are shaped, if not sculpted into life with a considerable amount of space and pause so that the precisely articulated legato phrases fall like shafts of light on tall trees.

Many songs have minimal harmony, and exalt in the rich melodicism that has long been present in the best avant-gardists. The juxtaposition of relaxed, tightly controlled motion and weight of the timbres, not to mention the sparse yet warm bass lines of the magnificent John Lindberg conspire to make a symphony with a quartet, challenging our perception of where small groups end and orchestras begin. Smith and Threadgill in particular have reached the point in their development as players where one note can impact like several chords and it is the size, the swell, the largeness and luster of brass and reeds that create something massive in every sense of the term. And yet Vijay Iyer playing organ, with a Ra-like mischief on ‘Rocket’, also turns out to be one of the other delights of work that sets the blues on course for a place in space as well as on earth.