Interview: Tommy Smith, Scotland’s classical jazzman

TOMMY SMITH, one of the biggest names in jazz, will play in Scotland’s Last Night of the Proms on Saturday. So, what draws the saxophonist to classical music’s biggest night of the year?

TOMMY SMITH, one of the biggest names in jazz, will play in Scotland’s Last Night of the Proms on Saturday. So, what draws the saxophonist to classical music’s biggest night of the year?

Tommy Smith is, above all else, Scotland’s premier jazz saxophonist. The Edinburgh-born 45-year-old has lived and breathed jazz for about as long as he can remember, passing out from the famous Berklee School of Music in Boston in the 1980s, and subsequently rubbing musical shoulders with all the names that mattered in the business – Gary Burton, John Scofield and Chick Corea among them.

I last interviewed Smith in 1988, just as he was about to sign up with the prestigious Blue Note Records, out of which came a quick succession of critically-acclaimed albums – Step by Step, Peeping Tom, Standards and Paris. By his early 20s he was a household name in jazz.

He later went on to host a series of jazz television specials for the BBC, team up with Scots pop duo Hue and Cry, generally stretch creative boundaries, particularly in extended solo improvisation, and in more recent times set up the new jazz course at the Royal Scottish Conservatoire, as well as founding and directing the Scottish National Jazz Orchestra and the Tommy Smith Youth Jazz Orchestra.

This summer alone he’s been touring extensively in America and Canada, more recently in Sardinia, Denmark and Sweden. “There’s no real pattern as to who I play with, other than 99 per cent of it all is jazz,” says the guy whose golden sound enriched the soundtrack to The Talented Mr Ripley.

So why on Earth is he appearing this Saturday in Scotland’s Last Night of the Proms – a simultaneous version of the same evening’s London Proms finale – performing one of his own compositions with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra? What draws this jazz supremo to classical music’s biggest, some would say most pretentious, night of the year?

The thing is, Smith has been more than simply dabbling in the classical idiom for over 20 years. “In 1989, Roger Pollen, former manager of the Scottish Ensemble, came up to me and asked if I would be interested in writing a concerto for sax and strings. I told him I didn’t even know how to tune a violin, but he said he could help there by providing an open door to the ensemble’s ­musicians.”

It was an invaluable experience for him, giving life to a concerto called To be joined together, though Smith still felt he had “definite issues with form and balance”.

Around the same time, he teamed up with the BBC SSO to premiere William Sweeney’s An Rathad Ur for jazz saxophonist and orchestra. “I definitely played far too loud. I had no concept of how I fitted in to this strange classical world,” he recalls.

A chance meeting in 1993 convinced Smith it was worth persevering. “I had written a piece for piano and sax, and had initially tried it out with jazz pianists, but they couldn’t handle the amount of notes on the paper. At a party in Perth, I was introduced to classical pianist Murray McLachlan. I handed him the music and he played it perfectly first time. Here was the type of guy I needed to hook up with.”

Smith’s two sonatas – Hall of Mirrors and Dreaming with Open Eyes – arose out of that partnership, charmingly recorded on what was to be his first classical disc. “All of this had a knock-on effect on my jazz playing, getting a better hold of dynamics and phrasing, playing high and soft, moving time around,” he maintains.

It certainly gave him a hunger for further compositional collaborations, including Hiroshima in 1998, a commission for the London-based ­Orchestra of St John’s, Smith Square; and Edinburgh, a colossally-scored work for the Edinburgh Youth Orchestra, which the orchestra took on its 40th anniversary European Tour in 2003.

In the latter he was careful to give the saxophones plenty to do. “I had played for the EYO once and didn’t like the fact that I had to sit for long periods doing nothing, and when I did play it was to duplicate everyone else,” he says.

There were still things in Edinburgh that left Smith dissatisfied, however. “I still felt like a ­beginner,” he confesses. Even when he revisited it, recasting it as a shorter piece to be played with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, “there were still a lot of problems with it, particularly my attempts to balance the instruments”. But the experience brought with it invaluable advice from conductor Garry Walker.

Smith has never been too proud to ask for help, but the resultant feedback came as a surprise. “I asked James MacMillan for help, and he said I didn’t need it; Nigel Osborne looked at my scores and said I didn’t need it; Bill Sweeney said the same. So I just went to the text books and worked it out for myself. Rimsky Korsakov’s book was pretty good, especially on how to balance instruments.”

This Saturday, playing with the BBC SSO under the highly adaptable Stephen Bell, Smith will unveil his most recent reworking of an earlier composition – a recomposed version of his 2002 arrangement of Chic Corea’s Children’s Songs, which he premiered with the Scottish Ensemble ten years ago, and also part-recorded in a sax and piano version with McLachlan.

“The original work lasts 60 minutes, and the BBC wanted ten, so I started chopping away at it, but I found it hard-cutting stuff I liked, so I just started again from scratch,” he explains. “I took several of Chic’s songs and surrounded these with original pieces that act as interludes. It makes more musical sense, and lasts 19 minutes.”

That’s not all Smith will play in a jazz-infused Last Night that also features flamboyant pianist Joanna MacGregor in Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, songs by Irving Berlin and Noel Coward, and Bernstein’s rip-roaring Prelude, Fugue and Riffs, written originally for Woody Herman’s big band. He will also perform Rachmaninov’s silken ­Vocalise with the SSO strings, though at this point he has no idea how he will approach it.

“I’ve analysed the harmony to see where it’s going and it’s thrown up a conundrum for me,” he says. “I’m aware of the various ways of approaching it; the question is, do I play it legit, or improvise the repeats? I’m not sure what to do here.”

But I can’t imagine Tommy Smith will be in any doubt when the time comes. Like the classic jazzer he is, he lives for the moment.

• Tommy Smith appears with the BBC SSO and other guests in Scotland’s Last Night of the Proms at the City Halls, Glasgow on Saturday, also broadcast live on BBC2.