Tonight in The Art of the Improvisors, the first episode in a series about clarinetist and composer Bill Smith.
Bill Smith a.k.a William O. Smith, born in Sacramento, California, joined the Oakland Symphony at the age of 15. After high school he went on tour with a dance band, but after two weeks he decided he didn’t like life ‘on the road’. He went back to New York City, where he studied briefly at the Julliard School of Music before returning to California to Mills College in Oakland, where he met Dave Brubeck. Smith played in Brubeck’s Octet in 1947. In 1957, at the age of 30, Smith recorded his three-movement ‘Concerto for Clarinet and Combo’ with Shelly Manne and His Men. In 1959, the Bill Smith Quartet recorded the album ‘Folk Jazz’, subtitled ‘Folk songs in Modern Jazz Dress’. The quartet consisted of Jim Hall on guitar, and, again, Monty Budwig on bass and Shelly Manne on percussion.
The Brubeck Quartet made 3 albums of Smith’s music in the early 1960s, and Smith rejoined the quartet in the 1980s. He lived in Rome for a few years before settling in Seattle, Washington, in the 1960s. He composed and played contemporary classical music as William O. Smith, exploring the capabilities of the clarinet in many ways. Between 1946 and 1950, the Dave Brubeck Octet, a group of young composers with modernist ideas, was active in the San Francisco Bay Area. Nat Hentoff called it ‘exploratory scored modern jazz’. The music has been released on the West-Coast Fantasy label in 1956. Brubeck was not satisfied with the sound quality, but was glad that someone had brought a recording device.
Playlist:
- What is This Thing Called Love? (Porter) 2:40
- IPCA (Smith) 2:45
- Schizophrenic Scherzo (Smith) 2:15
- Concerto for Clarinet & Combo (Smith) 20:07
- A-Roving 4:12
- Greensleeves 4:56
- John Henry 4:18
- Go Down, Moses 6:41
- Blow the Man Down 3:35
- Black is the Color of My True Loves Hair 4:10
