Still only 17, tenorist Tommy Smith has managed to become a leading figure in the British jazz scene and now looks set to take on the international scene. After only five years of playing, he has accumulated a wealth of live playing experience, recorded three albums, and appeared on a large number of radio shows and completed several European tours. COLIN WRIGHT traces his meteoric career.
In five years. Tommy Smith has gone from being an unknown schoolboy to becoming a brilliant tenor player: One of the most intriguing features of his life is his precocity, but he isn’t just good for his age, he is good for any age and this makes him one of the most exciting players around; he is at the beginning of what promises to be a fine and fruitful career.
His beginnings go back a long way, even given his youth. His first experience of jazz came when his father, who played the drums, took him to a jazz club. From then on he was hooked. He chose to play the saxophone because he ‘liked the sound and the shape’. His only previous musical instrument was some recorder playing at primary school when he was 10. After a few lessons at school he began listening to Glenn Miller, Stan Getz and Coleman Hawkins. He would ‘take the solos from the records and work out the rhythms and then write them down’. He played his first gig when he was 12, sitting in with a local Dixieland jazz band. He remembers the gig vividly and even recalls that the numbers he played on were I Got Rhythm and Too Blue.
He practised for up to eight hours a day and as he said, ‘I started with Home On The Range and worked my way up from there passing through the various developments in jazz from Dixieland through bebop to modern.’ At each stage he would learn to play like the best players of each style and then once he had mastered it he would move on. Tommy thinks that to play well is ‘easy and that all it takes is practice”, but he seems to have learnt faster than almost anybody else. He attended a jazz school run by Gordon Cruickshank, the presenter of Radio Scotland’s Take The Jazz Train programme and also a saxophone player, and then formed his own band shortly afterwards and began to gig regularly. He was then 14 years old and was beginning to attract a lot of attention. His quartet won the Best Band Trophy and he received the Best Musician Trophy at the 1981 Edinburgh International Jazz Festival. He was playing mostly bebop at this time and was sitting in with the best musicians in Edinburgh.
By 1982 his reputation was well established and he was asked to perform on Oscar Peterson’s TV show, Jazz At The Gateway. He played Autumn In New York with the great Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen, Gordon Beck, Philip Catherine and Jon Christensen. At about the same time, he was accepted into the European Community Jazz Orchestra directed by Bobby Lamb and Rick Taylor, and toured Belgium and Ireland with them. Although he enjoyed working in the orchestra he prefers small group jazz, since it affords ‘the greatest freedom for soloing’. By this time Tommy had formed his first quintet and had recorded his first radio session.
When he had turned 16 his new trio was chosen by a distinguished panel of judges to perform at the 1983 Leverkusen Jazz Festival in Germany. After those performances, he was approached by the New York Jazz Quintet and he went on tour with them around Britain in August 1983. By this time he was only 16 and yet he had recorded three radio programmes and two albums with his own groups for GFM and Head Records. Both albums featured original numbers and some standards.
By March 1983 Tommy had received the Phil Woods Jazz Masters Incentive Award and also a scholarship from the Berklee Professional Music Scholarship Fund. He had written to Berklee College of Music in Boston to inquire about their courses and had sent them a sample tape of his playing. They wrote back and offered him a place at the college. On January 17th 1984, 16-year-old Tommy went to study at Berklee. This move was accomplished with the financial assistance of his community and through numerous funds and benefit gigs. By this time he had become ‘a big fish in a little pond and needed to go out and discover new players’. The world was opening up for Smith, yet he was only 16, and going to Berklee was a big jump. He described his first day at the college as the worst day of his life. ‘I didn’t know anyone, there were no blankets on the bed and everything seemed so strange.’ Soon, however, he was taking part in the daily jam sessions which run from six until midnight after all the classes were over. The practice rooms in Berklee are open 24 hours a day and are used for all of that time.
Tommy’s playing soon began to be noticed and he formed his own group – called the Scandinavian Quartet because most of the band was Scandinavian. This band is now slightly revised and includes Terje Gewelt, the bass player from Norway who is studying privately with Miroslav Vitous. The drummer Ian Froman, from Ottawa, is participating in master classes with the great jazz drummer Elvin Jones whilst the piano player, Lazlo Gardonyi, graduated from the Bela Bartok Conservatoire in 1979 and now attends Berklee full time. This group toured successfully through Denmark, Finland, Norway and Scotland and during this time they recorded two radio programmes as well as Tommy’s third album, live at the Queen’s Hall in Edinburgh. The album was due for release in December 1984 on GFM records and the band plan to tour Europe again in May 1985.
Whilst on his mid-term break Tommy spent some time in New York where he was twice invited by Jaco Pastorius to play with the Word Of Mouth band at the Blue Note in the Village. He also played a jam session with Rashied Ali and Jaco during that week. It is a mark of his confidence and his ability that he was not over-awed by such players and that indeed it felt natural to be playing with them. ‘It was good to play with people of such exceptional ability,” he said. Tommy spent last summer in Edinburgh and was guest tenor player with the Ronnie Scott Quintet during the city’s festival, as well as appearing once again with the New York Jazz group and doing a brief tour of Britain. Tommy re-enrolled at Berklee last September for another four months and will continue rehearsing his quartet.
Even after all of these achievements. Tommy Smith remains calm and even reticent about his abilities, claiming that he’s ‘still not good enough for New York where even the club players are brilliant’. He doesn’t drink, smoke or use drugs and his main aim is to become a good player and earn his living from playing jazz. ‘I want to get away from the practise and play scene and build my playing up on to a subconscious level where I can communicate more spontaneously.’
The young tenorist’s great hero is John Coltrane, whom he felt ‘could solo over a long period and make the simplest ideas sound brilliant. He is quite simply the best.’ Smith plays modern jazz but disregards labels as he feels that any music can sound good if it is played well. British fans will be able to hear proof of this principle when Smith tours the UK with his quartet this spring.
