Tom Smith on A Year in the Life

Having been a finalist (not once but twice) on BBC's Young Jazz Musician, talented saxophonist Tom Smith is proving he is a force to be reckoned with as a performer, a bandleader and a composer. Graduating from the Royal Academy of Music, he has since gone on to create bands and projects of his own, as well as writing arrangements for high profile ensembles and performances. His brand new release, A Year in the Life, is a dynamic big band album that reflects the London life of music-makers, jam-packed with well-crafted compositions that certainly prove that big band music isn't going anywhere. I was able to get an insight into the album from the bandleader himself where we discussed influences, the importance of big band music, and what might be next for the group.

First, a huge congratulations on the new album. I know that you celebrated the release with a concert at Ronnie Scott's at the beginning of the year - how was that? 

Thank you, it was a fantastic concert. Ronnie Scott's is where we started the band two and half years ago and it’s somewhere I’ve been going since I was twelve. It's such a historic place to get to play jazz, so it was a really amazing evening there. It really is a favourite place of mine. 

A Year in the Life is an exciting reflection of London life and music. Did you have to get quite exclusive about the sources of inspiration to write about? 

In a way it was sort of the opposite! It ended up being that the music I was writing seemed just to fall under this kind of heading. I think it's just the life I was leading and the life of being a musician was just sort of subconsciously inspiring the music. I was thinking about Ronnie's, about Soho where I spent a huge amount of time, as well as the hectic back and forth that musicians experience.

There's a few songs on here that you could definitely go, 'well, how is that related to London?' Like “Speedboat in Trouble” is a title, but it's not really about London. It’s the construct of the song, the feeling of bebop, of London jam sessions and meeting people. I’d say about half the album I’d written for our first ever gig, and then over the next nine months I finished getting it streamlined and finished songs. My partner, Ollie Haywood is the designer for the album artwork and started getting some sketches together of what the feel of the album could look like. And then they came up with this incredible sketch of London that fit the music so well. 

You were a finalist twice on BBC’s Young Jazz Musician. How did these early experiences influence you?

I’ve been playing jazz since I was a teenager. I could listen to it all my life because it was a whole family thing. My granddad used to play the drums, my brother played the trumpet before me and my dad plays the double bass, so it's always been part of the family. I think doing BBC Young Musician taught me how much you need to connect with the audience.

When I was young, I'd go and see incredible musicians playing jazz standards in small clubs and the easy takeaway from that is to go 'oh, I can play jazz standards, I know those songs'. But there was something about doing Young Musician where I had the most fun connecting with the audience, putting together my own programme and trying to come up with something that said something about me. I definitely think doing that very high stress kind of performance, and trying to make it relaxed and personable, has really helped shape how I approach concerts, programming gigs and putting bands together. It helped me think that it's really a relationship between you and the audience, and finding something that you can both connect with. 

You have to balance being a player, a band leader, and when you're performing live, a conductor as well. So how do you manage that? 

Yeah, that's taken a good few years to find the right balance for it. One of the things I really enjoy doing in other bands is playing lead alto, because you get a lot of responsibility to shape the sound you're playing almost the entire gig. I realised that if I was going to try and run this band, do the conducting, and write the music, there was no way I could also do that because I'd be knackered. So the first thing was to make sure that I was surrounded by musicians who could take all the pressure off.

I think the preparation is knowing the music absolutely inside out, which when you're writing it and you're getting really deep into the weeds of figuring out the minutiae of exactly what should happen, it all goes in. You’d have to ask the band how good my conducting is... I don't think I'm very good at it! But I definitely like to think that I lose myself in it, and I try to give them the best direction I can. With all the music I've written since recording this album I've definitely let myself write some slightly harder, more conducted music that needs a lot more work from me, to make sure we can all stay together. 

Knowing those players as well as you do must build up quite a lot of trust to be able to step into that role a little bit more.

Yes, that's a good point. It also influences the writing, when I know who I'm writing for. I was trying to make sure it's fun for everyone too, because the last thing you want is people to be head down in the music, slogging through it. You want to make sure that the music is really fun to play because even the most beautiful music in the world, if it's really hard to play, can change the vibe of it a bit. 

You've mentioned Pat Metheny and Carla Bley as influences, just to name a few. How do you incorporate those into a big band setting? 

I think those musicians have made it up on that list because they're my favourites, it’s the music I've been listening to for a really long time. Carla Bley has written a lot for a big band and so has Maria Schneider and Guy Barker. So there's a few direct things that you can take from them and go, well, what's a big band sound? But when I think about Pat Metheny, sometimes I think about approaches to the form of a song in a different way. “A Year in the Life” is definitely the most overt Metheny reference; it’s got the guitar in there, but it’s also in how he would write a song with a build-up of different sections.

When I think of Guy Barker there's a great album, The Amadeus Project, which has a narrator who is telling a story all the way through. So I sometimes try to incorporate that on a gig and will talk a bit more about a song before we play, to give the context. On some of our gigs we do a murder mystery song where it's like a game on the night: it turns out one of the members of the band is the murderer and there's musical clues that the audience has to try and figure out. Maria Schneider is another influence for me. She has soundscapes: all these sorts of grand and lush environments that her music puts to sound. So occasionally I'll try and write something in that zone, something that will really evoke images of places and time.

“Swansea Uproar” began life as an internet sensation. How did that come about? 

“Swansea Uproar” was one of the first songs I probably ever wrote that ended up being on this album. I wrote it about seven or eight years ago, and I'd been doing it as a quartet or as a septet, sort of refining it. And then right at the beginning of the first lockdown in 2020, the musician community that I was part of felt incredibly bereft of what to do after a couple of months. We weren't getting to perform at all, and people were coming up with some very creative ideas of how to get by.

I’d always had in my mind that ever since I was a kid, I wanted to have my own big band, and there’d never been a good time to do it. But that was the time. So I rang around all my friends and all my colleagues, and everyone was completely up for donating their time. Everyone recorded their parts from home, we put it out, and it just had such a fantastic reception. It really inspired me to want to get all the rest of the music together, it was obviously resonating. That was the birth of this whole project, really, and that was five years ago now. It's taken a very long time to get this all together. 

You've mentioned that you want to kind of pull in a new audience to the genre. Why is that important to you? 

Well, the big band for me is one of those ensembles that I think no matter what music you listen to, the spectacle of eighteen musicians all working as one is something just universally incredible and awe-inspiring. A lot of my concert goers come up and say they've never come to see any jazz before, but they actually loved it. But I think the big band is one of those ensembles that has got so much potential. It’s lasted for over 100 years now because it's like a self-balancing acoustic ensemble.

We're in this amazing time where there's so many unique voices writing music for the big band that you wouldn't call jazz. I listen a lot to Canadian composer Darcy James Argue, who is a big influence on me, but if you listen to his albums, you wouldn't say 'this is jazz'. I like to think that I've written music that's quite accessible for anyone to find a way in and I want people who've never heard jazz before to want to come and enjoy it and be excited by it. I think it's very important, and the modern jazz audience these days is people of all ages, from all parts of the country, from all sorts of diverse backgrounds. I think people want to see that, they want to see a melting pot of cultures and ideas. 

Speaking of gigs, any future plans for the band?

Yes, we've got a fun year ahead of gigs to play around the country. I’m doing it as a big band, but I'm also doing a slightly smaller band version for some of the smaller venues. There’s a whole set of music I've been writing too. I'd love to record a suite of music called ‘Trailers’, and each piece within it references a different genre of film music. It's been really fun to perform a handful of times over various gigs. I'd like to write a little bit more music in that style because that's been a real challenge.

I'm hopeful in the next few years we can bring the band to venues further outside of London, too. We've been reasonably London-centric so far, so it'd be nice to move a bit more around the country. I'm hoping to bring the music to Europe as well, and that would be something I'd love to do to bring the music to a wider audience. I'm getting excited thinking about it. 

Is there anything else people should know about the album?

Well, this is the first time I've put music on vinyl, which has been a really fun and amazing experience to do! We went back and forth on trying to make sure it sounds the best it can, and we've gone for a really fun, orange, translucent disk with a beautiful splatter effect on it. So a lot of work has gone in for all the audiophiles out there, or for anyone who really likes having a vinyl collection.

A Year in the Life is available now on Fey Moose Records.