Dark Lady of the Sonnets

Dark Lady of the Sonnets is an album by American jazz trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith, which was released in 2011 on the Finnish TUM label. He leads the band Mbira, an emsemble dedicated to realizing a spiritual music inspired by the mystical nature of the Mbira music, a tradition of the Shona people of Zimbabwe, but with a creative contextualization in the contemporary music language. Mbira is a trio composed of Smith on trumpet and flugelhorn, Chinese pipa player Min Xiao-Fen, who has collaborated with avant-garde musicians such as Derek Bailey and John Zorn, and drummer Pheeroan akLaff, who has played with Smith since the mid-seventies.