By Fred Jung

If I had a nickel for every time I popped Journey's FRONTIERS into the CD player and forward it to track number five, "Faithfully" when I was with a hottie, I'd be a millionaire. So when I first got a hold of Steve's WHERE WE CAME FROM, a jazz album with his new venture Vital Information, I have to admit, I was a bit cynical. Here was the drummer (yes, all you closet '80s fans, Steve was the timekeeper for Journey) of one of my favorite bands growing up, playing improvised music? But was I in for a shocker, it was killing. And so when I got an opportunity to chat one on one with the man, I was dumbfounded to hear that he originally had studied jazz. But that is the way it is sometimes, you think you know something, and "bam," you are hit in the face. So while I choke here, I present unto you, Steve Smith, the Journey-man and seasoned jazzbo, unedited and in his own words.

FJ: Let's start from the beginning.

SS: Well, when it came time to pick an instrument in the fourth grade, I picked the drums. I don't really have a great reason for it. It just felt right. I just stayed with it ever since. It just became the right direction for me. This was in 1963, so I started when I was nine years old. I started out with drum lessons. Joining a band, I took more of a traditional route. The local drum teacher, who was a big band drummer, taught me in that style from the very beginning. I was coming from the swing era, in fact, because my teacher was from that. After I graduated high school, I went onto the Berklee College of Music and mainly played jazz for the three years that I was there. And my first touring gigs were with Buddy DeFranco, a bebop clarinet player. I also played in a band called Fringe with George Garzone and Richie Appleman. It was a trio, an avant-garde trio. And then I ended up with Jean-Luc Ponty and that was my introduction in some ways to the rock world. He was touring. We started at clubs and moved into theaters with sound systems and lights and high level volume and it got me interested more on the rock side. Then when the opportunity came for me to play with Ronnie Montrose, I took that and that was pretty much a big departure for me to play. That was an instrumental rock band at the time and he was playing instrumental in the style of say, Jeff Beck. We were the opening act for Journey and that led to my gig with Journey, which I did for seven years. When that was over, I just continued playing rock and roll sessions when the opportunity came up, but most of my time was playing jazz again. I left Journey in '85 and by '86, I was with Steps Ahead with Mike Brecker and Mike Mainieri and Mike Stern and Darryl Jones on bass. And then I had started Vital Information in '81, while I was still in Journey and made three records while I was still in Journey and then I have continued that band ever since. So my career, at this point, is mainly focused on Vital Information and the various, different jazz, jazz-fusion projects that I've been playing on.

FJ: Let's talk about your collaboration with Jean-Luc Ponty.

SS: In context, I was twenty-two years old and I was in college. I quit college to go on the road with him. So it was a pretty big thrill for me to work with him. It was my first time doing a world tour and my first ever recording of an entire album with him, so I was pretty excited and lucky to get that gig. He was a leader that really knew what he wanted and had a very solid direction and as a sideman, had limited input. I had to see his vision come to life, but at that time, that was completely fine with me. I was pretty undeveloped as a player. It was really great for me. I learned a lot playing with him and the other musicians in the band, Allan Holdsworth, Tom Fowler on bass, and a guy named Allan Zavod on keyboards, so I really learned a lot from touring with him.

FJ: The first rule about the eighties is we don't talk about the eighties. And that leads us to the second rule, we don't talk about the eighties. But I have to break precedent and talk about your seven year stint as a member of Journey.

SS: (Laughing) Well, again, you have to put everything in context, Fred. At the time, I was very interested in experiencing rock. It wasn't like that was a huge part of my background, although I had played in some rock bands when I was in high school and listened to the music of Hendrix and Cream and Led Zeppelin and all the bands that were popular when I was a kid. But I was mainly more or less a jazz player and oriented to being a musician, so when I met the guys in Journey, they seemed to be at the upper end of the scale as rock bands were concerned as musicians. A lot of the rock bands that I had heard, I really would have had no interest in playing with. Neal Schon, a great rock guitar player, Gregg Rolie, who at the time was the keyboard player, Steve Perry, who I consider to be one of the best guitarists there is, at that time, especially because his vocal chops were pretty amazing, and Ross Valory, a solid rock and roll bass player, so I guess I saw it more like players. What were playing at the time was a combination of the old Journey music, which had odd timing, a Mahavishnu Orchestra meets rock and roll kind of stuff, and I really liked that and then I enjoyed the new songs they had. I thought they were nice tunes and again, it was pretty exciting for me. It was also interesting to go from being a sideman to being a band member. It was quite a transition. I had mainly been a sideman up to that point. I had to grow and learn how to be more of an equal contributor. That took some time, but they did give me the space and I grew into that. Strangely enough, as the group developed, in some ways, my input became less and less. Perry, Jonathan Cain, and Neal Schon became more powerful in a way as songwriters than Ross and I. I remember we had less of a participation, but that was at the very end. That was the RAISED ON RADIO record, but throughout, up until that point, it was cool participation and pretty exciting lives to go on, to be in a band that successful.

FJ: You stated how young you were at the time.

SS: At the time I was in Journey, Fred, I was twenty-three or twenty-four, just turned twenty-four when I joined the band. I was thirty by the time I left the band. It all happened in my youth (laughing). I'm forty-five now, so it was awhile ago.

FJ: I saw you play with Journey in my youth. So much has been made of the "rock and roll" lifestyle and at the time, Journey was one of the largest acts on the road, do you have a memorable performance, one that stands above all the others?

SS: It's not really any one, but there was a time when we were playing the biggest stadiums in the country and we played multiple nights, so that was pretty amazing just to be involved in something like that. I can't really zero in on one show. That whole experience, especially for six nights at the Los Angeles Forum or two nights at the Oakland Coliseum, the whole outdoor Coliseum, that holds sixty thousand, two nights at JFK Stadium in Philadelphia that holds ninety thousand a night, and we'd fill them up every single night. We did a whole tour like that, I believe it was in 1983.

FJ: I find myself taking a Journey CD out every once in a blue moon and spinning it, do you have a favorite tune for your years with the band?

SS: Not really, no.

FJ: Let's touch on your collaboration with Michael Brecker and Mike Stern in Steps Ahead.

SS: Well, if I could go back a little bit. Mike Stern and I have been playing together since about 1973, since we went to school together. I had played a lot with Mike then. I played with Bill Frisell, Jeff Berlin. There were a lot of students that were at Berklee for the music at that time who later went onto become pretty well known. So Mike and I have known each other that long. He, in fact, played guitar on my first Vital Information record in 1981 (VITAL INFORMATION). So when I joined Steps Ahead, that was '86, I already had three records out by Vital Information. But the process, the whole experience of playing with Steps Ahead was very much another maturing process. To play with Mike Brecker every night and Mike Mainieri on vibes, and then we had Victor Bailey play bass about half the time and then Darryl Jones, and eventually, Jeff Andrews became the bass player and Jeff and I, Jeff, eventually became the bass player in Vital Information. He's on our last recording. So that was tremendous and I continued to tour with Steps Ahead for seven years, even though Stern left and eventually, Mike Brecker left and were replaced by different players, we kept the band going and I got a chance to tour all over the world with that group. I think we made three records with them and gained a lot of playing experience and also made a lot of connections with the music, with the business, and I got a record deal with the same label they were on, Intuition. I also met the promoters and club owners and agents and all that and was able to, then, go from Steps Ahead to getting my band on that same touring circuit. A lot of times, what jazz musicians do is, in some ways, they have to have an apprentice period, where they play with someone. They get a reputation and then they can set into their own career. But usually, jazz musicians don't start from nothing and get a deal and tour the world. Like Mike Stern's a good example, played with Miles Davis for years. And that was his step into the jazz world and most musicians, most jazz musicians do something like that. For me, Steps Ahead was that vehicle.

FJ: Let's talk about one of your last Vital Information outings, WHERE WE COME FROM.

SS: OK, WHERE WE COME FROM was inspired by the research that I was doing as I was getting ready to do the last Journey record we did. You could call it a reunion record. We recorded it in '96 called TRIAL BY FIRE and I hadn't played with the band for eleven years. I just had the idea to make the gig more interesting to me. I wanted to examine the roots of rock and roll in a similar tradition or in the way that I had examined the roots of jazz to just help me be a better player, more of a musician. I had done a lot of that with jazz, but really didn't do it with rock. I just played rock more or less intuitively. As I was reading and buying CDs, tapes, and old records and what not, I just discovered how much I loved the sound of those instrumental bands that were in the sixties, especially like Booker T and the MG's, who had some similar instrumentation to Vital Information. It was a quartet, keyboard, bass, guitar, and drums. They were based around the Hammond B3 and Tom Coster grew up playing the accordion and the Hammond B3 and he hadn't played it since he had left Santana and I asked him to bring the B3 to rehearsal and things clicked. We got into a R&B funkier groove as a result and just the sound of the Hammond and writing songs, so the Hammond really worked. Also, we were trying to capture the spirit of the time. There was a more free spirit feeling in the studio from what I can gather from listening to the music, because it wasn't very conscious. We played and there were little mistakes and what not, but people seemed to leave them and just go for the spirit and that was our inspiration for the WHERE WE COME FROM record. I'm just finishing mixing the follow-up record to that. So we have another record that is a continuation of that concept. So we have that record coming out next year. So while we were on tour and promoting WHERE WE COME FROM, we recorded a double live CD, which is mixed and in the can and will hopefully come out in about two months. So that is coming out as well.

FJ: And the title for that?

SS: I'll call it LIVE AROUND THE WORLD: WHERE WE COME FROM TOUR 1998-99.

FJ: That's a mouth-full.

SS: (Laughing) I know it's a long title, but it explains what it is. We recorded it in Australia, Canada, the US, and Amsterdam. So we recorded it all around the world during our world tour, a little bit from every place.

FJ: Let's get into the record that you are mixing.

SS: It's a studio record. A Vital Information studio record. It will come out March or April. We're booking our tour for next March. We got a week on hold down at Catalina Bar and Grill, down in Los Angeles, the second week of March. We hope to have the record out by then, or at least the live record and then shortly after the studio record.

FJ: Have a name for it?

SS: Not, yet. I haven't picked out a name for that one, but something like WHERE WE'RE AT TODAY (laughing). I don't know, something to that effect.

FJ: And THE STRANGER'S HAND?

SS: THE STRANGER'S HAND was a result with my relationship with Tone Center Records. Tone Center specializes in putting together, what I would call, all-star bands and we get together and generally create music in the studio, write and record simultaneously. With this record, I put together musicians that I had never met or played with, but who I really loved their musicianship and their playing. Jerry Goodman, the violinist from the Mahavishnu Orchestra, Howard Levy, who plays harmonica and piano, and he was from Bela Fleck and the Flecktones and Burbridge, who is a new bass phenomenon from the Allman Brothers Band. We got together and in nine days, wrote and recorded a record that spans a pretty wide range, from improvised harmonica and drum duet to quartet acoustic jazz sounding pieces to full on fusion reminiscent of the Mahavishnu Orchestra. It was really pretty exciting and it was a very rewarding album to be a part of.

FJ: In nine days, having never played together, it is surprising that the four of you jelled together.

SS: Everything came together right away. It felt really natural.

FJ: And lastly, STEVE SMITH & BUDDY'S BUDDIES?

SS: I had been touring and being guest drummer with the Buddy Rich Big Band for the last few years when they occasionally go out on the road. I've been going gigs and sometimes Dave Weckl did some gigs with them. In 1997, we played some gigs and had the idea to have a small group that was made up of members of the big band as more or less an opening act for the big band. So I played with Steve Marcus on tenor, Andy Fusco on alto, Lee Musiker, who are all on the album. And at that time, John Patitucci was playing bass and we played some gigs with that group and we had fantastic time and the saxophone asked me if it would be possible to record and so I presented it to Tone Center and they agreed to record that band. So we had the piano player, Lee Musiker, write arrangements and we rehearsed for a couple of days and went in the studio and recorded direct to two-track, in the jazz tradition. We used the same line-up with Lee Musiker on piano, Andy Fusco and Steve Marcus, and we had Anthony Jackson play bass because Anthony played with Buddy for years in the early seventies. The concept was that we wanted everybody to be Buddy Rich alumni, of course, except for me. I love how that came out. We are actually going on tour with that band in about two weeks.

FJ: Give me some tour dates.

SS: We are playing at the Bottom Line in New York on November 17. And then we are playing in Hartford, Connecticut and Boston at a combination clinic and music store, and some dates in Montreal, Canada.

FJ: Are you going to do another record with that band?

SS: Definitely, that was a lot of fun. You've heard these records right?

FJ: I have.

SS: What's your take on these?

FJ: They are good records. Andy is a good player. I'm actually looking forward to the live album, long title and all.

SS: (Laughing) Thanks.