Smith takes his A team on the road

Folk & Jazz critic

Wednesday 24 October 2012

Almost 100 years of jazz development will pass through Tommy Smith's fingers over the coming weeks as the saxophonist directs the Scottish National Jazz Orchestra's five-date homage to Duke Ellington and then takes his contemporary quartet, Karma, on tour.

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The SNJO is beginning a Duke Ellington tribute tour. Rob Adams reports

The two settings could hardly be more different, with Karma utilising electronics and drawing on jazz of the past 40 years and the Ellington music essentially asking the orchestra's players to forget what they've learned from their more recent heroes and get into the mind-set of musicians who, in some cases, served the same master for decades.

On the eve of those dates, the SNJO was named Best UK Big Band at the 2012 British Jazz Awards on Monday night, following on from its Best Ensemble title at the All Party Parliamentary Jazz Awards in May."Playing Ellington's a challenge for us," says Smith, pictured right, who has spent every available minute over the past few months researching videos of Ellington's orchestra, sorting through a pile of arrangements a metre high and even drawing up graphs of who played what in a bid to present the highest quality, most authentic celebration possible of the most prolific composer and bandleader in jazz who recorded from the 1920s almost right up to his death in 1974. We don't want to get too academic about it and in the end what matters most is that the audience hears a lot of really great music played really well. But we want to pay attention to details such as the way we look – it'll be smart, black ties, white shirts all round – how we set up onstage, and even the kind of mutes the horns use."Ever the stickler for such particulars, Smith has managed to locate hard-to-find pixie mutes for the trombone section. It's the musicians whose services he needs on these gigs and the instruments they'll be playing that have taxed him most, however. The strength of Ellington's saxophone section as clarinet players has caused Smith to shift all the most demanding clarinet parts on to Martin Kershaw's music stand and promote the former Young Scottish Jazz Musician of the Year, Ruaridh Pattison, from his youth orchestra to the lead alto chair in Kershaw's place."Leading the saxophone section is quite a step up for Ruaridh, who is still in his early twenties, but he's looking forward it even if he sees it as a slightly daunting prospect ," says Smith. Although he himself wasn't generally associated with Ellington's music until he recorded his The Sound of Love album of Ellington and Billy Strayhorn classics in 1998, he did gain some first-hand insight into how Ellington's orchestra worked when, as a direct result of his playing on The Sound of Love, he was invited to join the World Jazz Orchestra the following year in an Ellington tribute that included former Ellington sidemen Buster Cooper, Britt Woodman and Aaron Bell. "The depth of experience these musicians brought to the music was really inspiring," says Smith. "Just standing beside Buster Cooper when he took a solo on a number he must have played a thousand times was an education. The guys in our orchestra have all been listening to how things were done back then and really preparing."Martin Kershaw has been working hard to emulate the clarinet styles of Jimmy Hamilton and Russell Procope. Pianist Brian Kellock rejoins for this tour because of his mastery of the stride style and trumpeter Tom MacNiven has huge respect for the players in whose footsteps he's following. For drummer Alyn Cosker, who also features in Karma, the Ellington project presents a particular challenge as he has to remould his style to fit the music."In the Ellington orchestra the rhythm section concentrated on swinging hard behind the soloists rather than developing a rapport with them," says Smith. "In other projects we've made the soloists the priority. "This time the focus is on the music itself. We have 27 pieces to play over two hours, so there's no room for extended improvisations. So we're really going out there to give people an idea of what it might have been like to hear the Ellington orchestra in person."The Scottish National Jazz Orchestra tours from tonight at Perth Theatre.

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Smith takes his A team on the road

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