BLP 1584

Louis Smith - Here Comes Louis Smith

Released - February 1958

Purchased from Transition Records

Recording and Session Information

Audio Sonic Sound, NYC, February 4, 1958
Louis Smith, trumpet; Cannonball Adderley as "Buckshot La Funke", alto sax; Duke Jordan, piano; Doug Watkins, bass; Art Taylor, drums.

Tribute To Brownie
Brill's Blues
South Side

Audio Sonic Sound, NYC, February 9, 1958
Louis Smith, trumpet; Cannonball Adderley as "Buckshot La Funke", alto sax #1,3; Tommy Flanagan, piano; Doug Watkins, bass; Art Taylor, drums.

Ande
Star Dust
Val's Blues

Track Listing

Side One
Title	Author	Recording Date
Tribute to Brownie	Duke Pearson	04/02/1958
Brill's Blues	Louis Smith	04/02/1958
Ande	Louis Smith	09/02/1958
Side Two
Star Dust	Hoagy Carmichael	09/02/1958
South Side	Louis Smith	04/02/1958
Val's Blues	Louis Smith	09/02/1958

Credits

Cover Photo:	CHARLES LOWE
Cover Design:
Engineer:
Producer:	ALFRED LION
Liner Notes:	LEONARD FEATHER

Liner Notes

"I'M SENDING you some test pressings." said Alfred Lion. "Let me know what you think."

I was intrigued by the way he worded it. Usually it would be "I'm sending you a new Jimmy Smith and I'd like you to write the notes for it," or "I'd like you to do the notes for a new Sonny Rollins I just sent you," but this time he was playing it cagey; pressed for further details, he clammed up.

Clearly the inference to be drawn was that the man who had gone out on a limb for Clifford Brown five years ago, and for Lee Morgan in 1956, had another discovery under his stylus. Sure enough, next morning there arrived two sides that confirmed not only my suspicions, but also the continued soundness of Alfred's judgment.

Louis Smith is an unknown trumpet player. Unknown, that is, at the time these notes went to press; his obscurity will certainly be short-lived. He signed an exclusive contract with Blue Note Records after Lion, having heard the music on this LP supervised by Tom Wilson, promptly decided to purchase the masters.

Edward Louis Smith was born May 20, 1931, in Memphis, Tenn. He and the trumpet first became acquainted in 1944; acquaintanceship became firm friendship when he was enlisted in the Manassas High School Band. Graduating in 1948 with a scholarship to Tennessee State University, he majored in music. Soon he was a member of the Tennessee State legions, which to the 1950's has become to a large extent what the famous Alabama State Collegians were to an earlier jazz generation. The college crew has produced such alumni as Jimmy Cleveland and Phineas Newborn. It was during the group's performance at Carnegie Hall celebrating a college poll victory that Louis Smith became, in his own words, a "determined jazz neophyte."

Beginning postgraduate work immediately after graduation, he later transferred from Tennessee the University of Michigan, where he continued studying trumpet under the tutelage of Professor Clifford Lillya. "During this period." he recalls, "I enjoyed some of my most memorable moments as a young jazz musician, in the form of opportunities to play with visiting musicians such as Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, Thad Jones and Billy Mitchell."

Drafted in January 1954, Louis was assigned to the Third Army Special Services unit and again found himself associated with Phineas Newborn. After completing the tour of service duty he found his next civilian job, in late '55, at the Booker T. Washington High School in Atlanta, and since that time he has remained at the school, thus sharing the profession of such distinguished teachers as Cannonball Adderley, who at the time Louis went to Atlanta was himself employed in an identical capacity at a high school in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.

During his incumbency at the school Louis has had occasional opportunities to meet and play With some of the giants he had known through the medium of records, among them Sonny Stitt, Count Basie and Al McKibbon, "My pursuit of the jazz idiom," he says, "is due largely to my ardent admiration for the late Fats Navarro, Clifford Brown and Charlie Parker. Most recently I have played sets with Cannonball, Percy Heath, Philly Joe Jones, Lou Donaldson, Donald Byrd, Kenny Dorham and Zoot Sims."

For this, his first recording date, Louis found himself a similarly impressive list of names to serve as teammates. Buckshot La Furike (of the Florida La Funkes) is one of the modern alto giants and has been described by Nat Adderley as "my favorite soloist and main influence." Tommy Flanagan, of the Detroit Flanagans, has spent most of the past year or so with the Jay Jay Johnson Quintet while Duke Jordan, his alternate, has worked around New York With Cecil Payne et al, as has Art Taylor. Doug Watkins has been a colleague of Flanagan in the Jay Jay combo.

It will not take you long to discern, on the strength of these sides, what it was that Alfred Lion found in Louis Smith to give him the same faith he had in Brownie, in Horace Silver and Lee Morgan and all the many others whose careers he has helped. On the very first track, a medium-fast minor theme entitled Tribute to Brownie, Louis inaugurates the session with some thirty measures of free-wheeling ad lib horn accompanied only by Taylor's percussion. The perfect timing of his sequences of eighth notes, the skilful use Of the appogiatura, the casual incorporation of a cycle-of-fifths thought, the swinging confidence of the phrasing — all testify immediately to a degree of musicianship and maturity not too often found among newcomers.

As the listener makes his way through the rhythmically buoyant territory of Louis Smith's first grooves, he will find answered all the questions that may have been stirring in his subconscious. Can he play funky? Dig the first five choruses of Brill's Blues. Can he write interesting lines? Hear What he did with the Indiana changes on Ande, which he says was "written and named for my wife, who is a devoted jazz lover and my inspiration." Can he handle a ballad? The answer is provided by his treatment of Star Dust, a challenging piece of material in that everything conceivable would seem to have been said about it in a hundred previous interpretations on record; for Louis it represents a chance to show that restrained and tasteful melodic variations on a theme are just as important and effective a part of his musical personality as the ability to swing thoughtfully and originally on a fast-moving set of chords.

Then there are the two originals with which the second side continues - the moderato South Side, partly unison and partly voiced, in which the sympathetic vibrations between Smith and Buckshot make for a beautifully rounded opening chorus; and the swift, ingenious reworking of the perennial twelve-measure pattern on Val's Blues.

Lest it be assumed that in our enthusiasm for Mr. Smith we have failed to observe the operations of his fellow-conspirators, or that in Blue Note's own ecstasy he was allotted all the solo item, it must be reported here that everyone else involved is thoroughly represented. Buckshot, scattering his cartridges throughout the battle lines, is especially effective when dealing in sixteenth-note hand•grenades on South Side. Both pianists are accorded space compatible With their merits. Flanagan offers a discreetly efficient backing to Louis on Star Dust and covers some spirited solo ground on Ande and Val's Blues; Jordan on Brill's plays the kind of slow, single-line blues I have always felt shows him at his best, and is no less capable in his solo contributions to Brownie and South Side. Taylor, though functioning mainly as an inventive sectional backstop throughout, is heard in some felicitous fours with the horns on Val's Blues and Ande; Watkins, though also serving mainly in the section, grabs the spotlight for one of his relatively rare recorded solos on South Side and walks awhile On Val's Blues,

These are, of course, merely extra added attractions. Most of those Who invest in this disc will do so on the strength of the new name it introduces. Bearing in mind that this is Louis Smith's first record date, conscious too of Blue Note's previous record in the presentation of new talents, they will listen for evidence of the sounds that produced this faith in Louis Smith as a star of the next jazz generation, and they will be richly rewarded.

—LEONARD FEATHER

Supervision by TOM WILSON
Cover Photo by CHARLES LOWE

RVG CD Reissue Liner Notes

A NEW LOOK AT HERE COMES LOUIS SMITH

Do not believe those discographies that list Rudy Van Gelder's Hackensack studios as the location of Louis Smith's debut sessions. The six tracks were made on two dates held in Manhattan's Brill Building — hence "Brill's Blues." And as Leonard Feather notes, the supervision credit is even further from the Blue Note norm. That goes to Tom Wilson (1931—78), the pioneering African-American producer who would later figure in the success of Bob Dylan, Simon & Garfunkel and the Mothers of Invention. At this point, Wilson was a recent Harvard graduate who was selling off the released and unreleased catalog of the Transition label he had launched in 1955. In his brief run as an independent, Wilson had documented some of the period's most forward-looking music under the leadership of Sun Ra and Cecil Taylor, as well the emerging hard style as exemplified by Jazz Messengers Donald Byrd and Doug Watkins. Louis Snith was clearly of this latter camp, and therefore of obvious appeal to Alfred Lion.

Wilson showed a preference for upcoming trumpeters and regional jazz styles in his Transition years and after. The label's brief run introduced Boston's Herb Pomeroy and Detroit's Donald Byrd, pairing the latter on one occasion with with a second Bostonian, Joe Gordon; it also issued albums built around musicians from both cities. Transition's promised though never released (or, it appears, Jazz on the Farm was intended to spotlight the emerging talents of Tennessee and Alabama, a vision Wilson fulfilled in part with his 1959 Down Home Reunion collection on United Artists. The Young Men from Memphis, as they were billed on that album, included Louis Smith, as well as Booker Little, Frank Strozier, Georg Coleman, and brothers Phineas and Calvin Newborn. At the time of the present recordings, Smith belonged to an even more heavily promoted group: young trumpeters with the facility and creativity to offer hope of becoming "the next Clifford Brown.- His qualifications, so well displayed herein, led to a Blue Note contract and Lion-produced session, Smithville, from 1958. Then, after a brief stint with Horace Silver, Smith took a career turn, recalling his Transition label mate Pomeroy, as he shifted his focus to teaching at the University of Michigan and the Ann Arbor Public Schools. Smith's recording career resumed after a 20 year hiatus in 1978, and from then until he was incapacitated by a stroke in 2005, he provided periodic reminders of his skills with albums on the Danish SteepleChase label- Smith revisited "Ande" on a 1994 date under the leadership of alto saxophonist Alex Graham, as well as "Val's Blues" five years later on his own Bopsmith.

Another major attraction of these performances is the presence of Cannonball Adderley, albeit under a pseudonym. The alto saxophonist was under contract to Mercury's jazz imprint EmArcy at the time, and recorded with his working band for EmArcy on three of the four days separating Smith's sessions. Since Adderley„ still a year away from joining Miles Davis, was struggling to keep the original edition of his quintet afloat at the time, he had also begun to take gigs under what the French term noms de disque. In January 1957, as Ronnie Peters, he helped ignite Milt Jackson's exceptional Atlantic collection Plenty, Plenty Sad, and he makes similarly stunning contributions here as Buckshot La Funke (a moniker revived with slight variation in spelling four decades later for the Branford Marsalis jazz/hip-hop ensemble Buckshot LeFonque). By 1958, when his EmArcy deaI was still in place but expiring, Adderley was able to return to Blue Note for the classic Somethin' Else and launch his subsequent affiliation with Riverside, both under his name.

Another harbinger of Blue Note's future, and another instance of alternative names and credits, is found in the opening track. "Tribute to Brownie" is credited here to pianist/composer Duke Pearson, who would sign with the label in 1959 and served as a producer/liaison for the label throughout the 1960s. Another alumnus of the Third Army Special Services band, where he played both trumpet (his first instrument) and bass, Pearson would transition to piano after returning to his native Atlanta, where he led a quartet featuring Smith's trumpet during 1958. Pearson's ode to Clifford Brown was also taped by Adderley's quintet in a medium-tempo version two days after the present recording, with the same title but Nat Adderley cited as co-composer. The tempo was slower still when Kenny Dorham recorded the melody three months later, although KD called the piece "Larue" (the name of Brown's wife) and cited Brownie himself as the author.

— Bob Blumenthal, 2007