Sunday, December 17, 2017 - 2:00pm to 7:00pm
This Sunday, December 17, from 2-7 pm ET, Sid Gribetz presents a five hour radio special celebrating the career of jazz violinist Stuff Smith.
Smith was an innovator of jazz violin and a leading figure of small group combos and jumpin’ entertainment in the 1930's.
Stuff Smith derived a deep, driving, sound on his fiddle, with unique voicings, heartfelt tones, and a fluid, driving sense of rhythm and swing that enraptured the soul.
He was a dynamic showman, a humorous vocalist with novelty songs such as “I’se A Muggin’”, “You’re A Viper”, and “Knock Knock Who’s There”. As his biographer Anthony Barnett has perceptively noted, Smith could fulfill the roles of comic jive at the same time as being a serious, investigative musician, like his hero Louis Armstrong, his pal Fats Waller, and his protégé Dizzy Gillespie.
He was a dynamic showman, a humorous vocalist with novelty songs such as “I’se A Muggin’”, “You’re A Viper”, and “Knock Knock Who’s There”. As his biographer Anthony Barnett has perceptively noted, Smith could fulfill the roles of comic jive at the same time as being a serious, investigative musician, like his hero Louis Armstrong, his pal Fats Waller, and his protégé Dizzy Gillespie.
Hezekiah Leroy Smith was born in Portsmouth, Ohio in 1909 to a middle class black family, his father a barber, mother a teacher, and both musically inclined. “Stuff” was a childhood nickname. His older sister played classical music, but Smith followed his father, who had a band that played for popular local dances. In his early teens he moved to study at Johnson C. Smith University in North Carolina, but with his footloose bent, discarded formal training and left school to go on the road as a professional musician.
Stuff’s first major experience was the Alphonso Trent orchestra, a traveling “Territory Band”, in the late 1920's. Settling in Buffalo, New York in 1930, Smith became a leading figure in the local African-American musical and business community, directing bands and nightclubs along with Jimmie Lunceford and Lil Hardin Armstrong.
Smith moved to New York City in 1936 and fronting a small combo including Jonah Jones became an immediate sensation at the Onyx Club on fabled 52nd Street and with hit records. During the war years he worked with Fats Waller’s band, and in his own chamber jazz trio, then settled in Chicago and the Midwest, where he worked locally in the late 1940's and early 1950's.
In the late 1950's Smith joined up with the impressario Norman Granz, who presented Stuff on records with Ella Fitzgerald, Dizzy Gillespie, Oscar Peterson, Stephane Grappelli and the like, and on concert tours with the Jazz At The Philharmonic. Later, Smith took up residence with Joe Bushkin in a storied and sophisticated engagement at the Embers.
He then went to Europe, moving to Copenhagen in 1965, with many other American jazz expatriates, and Stuff Smith developed a great following there. However, suffering from various health problems throughout his life, he died shortly after his 58th birthday, on September 25, 1967.
We’ll explore Smith’s entire career in this retrospective broadcast.
