Hale Smith, composer

Published on Sunday 29 November 2009 21:14

Born: 29 June, 1925, in Cleveland, Ohio, Died: 24 November, 2009, in Long Island, New York, aged 84

CLASSICAL composer Hale Smith also worked as a performer and arranger with jazz greats such as Dizzy Gillespie and Chico Hamilton.

Smith, who wryly-described himself to the New York Times in 1990 as "one of America's most famous unknown composers", straddled the two worlds of jazz and classical music as a performer, composer, arranger and teacher.

From his early teens, he played jazz piano in the nightclubs of Cleveland, his hometown, but he went on to study classical composition and achieve a national reputation for an eclectic oeuvre and his synthesis of jazz and 12-tone technique.

He composed serial-influenced works such as Contours for Orchestra (1961) and Ritual and Incantations (1974), lyrical works such as the song cycle The Valley Wind (1952) and jingles and incidental music for radio, television and theatre. With the drummer Chico Hamilton, he composed the film score for Mr Ricco (1975), and his skill as an orchestrator led to a series of collaborations with the pianist Ahmad Jamal.

Smith was born in 1925 in Cleveland, where his father owned a printing shop. He began studying piano at seven and played mellophone in his high school band. At 16, he showed enough talent as a composer to attract the interest of Duke Ellington, who, after being shown one of his compositions, offered him advice.

After being drafted into the US army in 1943, Smith arranged the music for shows touring army camps in Florida and Georgia.

On leaving the service in 1945, he enrolled in the Cleveland Institute of Music, where he studied composition with the serialist Marcel Dick and theory with Ward Lewis. He earned a bachelor's degree in 1950 and a master's in 1952. That year his Four Songs won music licensing organisation BMI's first student composer award.

Smith moved to New York in 1958 and found work as an editor and consultant at several music publishing houses. He also taught at the CW Post campus of Long Island University, in Brookville, and at the University of Connecticut in Storrs, from which he retired in 1984.

Eclectic in his tastes and interests, Smith composed works that ranged from the richly dissonant orchestral composition Innerflexions (1977) to Dialogues and Commentary (1990-91), a witty set of variations for septet on a single motif.

His arrangements of spirituals were performed often by the sopranos Kathleen Battle and Jessye Norman.

In 2000, Composers Recordings released a survey of his work, Music of Hale Smith.

Although Smith, an adviser for the Centre for Black Music Research in Chicago, was routinely listed among the leading black composers of his day, he bristled at the designation. He wanted his work, and that of his black peers, to appear on programmes with that of Beethoven, Mozart and Copland.

"We don't even have to be called black," he wrote in an article in 1971. "When we stand for our bows, that fact will become clear when it should – after the music has made its own impact."