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In 2005, Smith reunited with Joe Locke, recording the album Sirocco and touring extensively with the vibist's group, and formed a duo with another long-time colleague, Norwegian bassist Arild Andersen, Adding drummer Paolo Vinaccia, this has since developed into one of Europe’s leading jazz trios, with a busy concert itinerary and a debut album, Live at Belleville (released on ECM Records in 2008), which received innumerable album of the year nominations in the press worldwide.

As well as two duo albums, Smith’s partnership with pianist Brian Kellock resulted in Smith creating an expanded jazz arrangement of George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue for the Scottish National Jazz Orchestra with Kellock as the featured soloist. This was premiered to huge acclaim as the opening concert of Edinburgh Jazz Festival on Friday July 28, 2006, a recording of which was released in May 2009. Another saxophone and piano pairing, with Swede Jacob Karlzon, has featured at jazz festivals in Edinburgh, Islay and Fife to enthusiastic acclaim.

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Scottish National Jazz Orchestra

In a busy schedule of touring, writing and recording, Smith found the time and energy to launch the Scottish National Jazz Orchestra in 1995, and remains its director. SNJO has presented programmes of both repertory classics and more contemporary works, often specially commissioned.

The repertory programmes have included Duke Ellington's extended suites, celebrations of Count Basie and Benny Goodman (with special guest Ken Peplowski) and the collaborations between Miles Davis and Gil Evans - Porgy & Bess, Sketches of Spain (both with Gerard Presencer as trumpet soloist) and Miles Ahead (with Ingrid Jensen). SNJO has also presented the music of Charles Mingus, Oliver Nelson, Benny Carter, Kenton, Monk, Steely Dan, Astor Piazzolla and Pat Metheny (with guitarists Jim Mullen, Phil Robson, Mike Walker and Kevin MacKenzie) and premiered special commissions by Keith Tippett, Florian Ross, and Geoffrey Keezer as well as specially commissioned arrangements of John Coltrane, Chick Corea (with drummer Gary Novak), and Wayne Shorter (featuring Gary Burton as soloist) compositions.

In addition, SNJO has performed music by contemporary jazz creators. These include Kenny Wheeler's Sweet Sister Suite; Joe Lovano's Celebrating Sinatra, with arrangements by the late Manny Albam; a programme of the music of Maria Schneider, conducted by the composer; and Smith's own Planet Wave, an adventurous large-scale composition made possible by the Arts Foundation/Barclays Bank jazz composition fellowship prize which marries Smith's music to poet Edwin Morgan's text to great effect. The concerts with Joe Lovano also featured the premiere of Smith's acclaimed Torah, a work based on the first five books of the Bible, in which a titanic struggle between good and evil is vividly enacted. Written over seventy days, the fifty-minute composition was created specially for the phenomenal American tenor saxophonist and SNJO. The same evening Torah was being premiered in Scotland, Dame Cleo Laine and John Dankworth premiered another work by Smith and Edwin Morgan, The Morning of the Imminent, at The Kennedy Center in Washington, DC.

SNJO has also provided a platform for jazz musicians and composers based in Scotland to write for big band in concerts devoted to suites comprising contributions by orchestra members and external contributors alike. These include The Solar Suite, Great Scots Suite and The Edinburgh Suite.

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The Future

Tommy Smith remains full of creative ideas and continues to receive recognition – an Honory Doctorate of Letters from Caledonian University in Glasgow followed his BBC Jazz Awards’ Heart of Jazz award in 2008 and he was voted winner of the Best Woodwind title at the inaugural Scottish Jazz Awards in 2009. It is clear that he is going to continue creating music of lasting value. His journey across more than two decades packed with original and inspiring music has demonstrated conclusively that his is a singular musical voice, and one which has much still to say.

His tireless work in jazz education, which has included conceiving the curriculum for the short-lived Scottish Jazz Conservatory and teaching individual students, continues and his campaigning for a jazz presence in Scottish further education was rewarded when the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama in Glasgow appointed Smith head of its newly formed jazz department, which opened in October 2009. In this, as in every area of artistic endeavour, Smith will be unstinting in his commitment and will be looking forward to sending fully prepared graduates out on the professional jazz musician’s road that he has graced with such distinction since taking those youthful Giant Strides.

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