Enoch Smith Jr.

Many, maybe even most, great artists have benefited from a single-minded devotion to their work. But for veteran pianist Enoch Smith Jr., jazz is but one of the life endeavors that define him, which explains why his terrific new album, The Book of Enoch, Vol. 1, is his first in eight years. 

Once an aspiring lawyer, he worked as an aide to New Jersey Assemblywoman Elease Evans from 2009 to 2011. In recent years, he has dedicated a large chunk of time in his current residence of Allentown, New Jersey to learning and teaching Brazilian jiu-jitsu (with a special eye to underprivileged kids). And as Director of Music and Worship, he leads the Jazz Vespers program at the Allentown Presbyterian Church.
“To be honest, I hadn’t really missed recording,” he says. But after he performed various hymns at the APC [Allentown Presbyterian Church] with bassist Kai Gibson and drummer David Hardy having taken a deep dive into the music’s history and the people who wrote it, the time was right to return to the studio. “The guys were, like, this is really great,” he says. “We should record this. Even the patrons at the services were, like, are you going to do anything with this? This is some really great music. So that's what led to recording it.
“I felt like this music was something that wasn’t being represented in a big way on the scene. We had played it a lot, so when we went into the studio, we recorded it as one set. We played the entire set through one time, a second time, and then that was it, you know?”
Featuring rearranged and reimagined songs, The Book of Enoch, Vol. 1 follows a series of varied, gospel-influenced jazz albums by Smith (all released on his own Misfitme label). But Smith has never immersed himself as deeply in religious music, or as swingingly in jazz, as he does here with his trio—a format he enjoys for the freedom it gives him. 
The album opens with a jaunting treatment of the timeless “Joshua Fit the Battle of Jericho.” Says Smith, “When I hear that song, it’s hard to not think about Mahalia Jackson. With this arrangement, I was trying to capture the feeling that I felt when I heard her performing this version of it, where she deviates from the melody.”
Another traditional tune, “Holy City,” draws from John’s description of heaven in the Bible, which Smith captures through his plaintive but brightly uplifting playing. 
Though he first heard contemporary gospel great Andrae Crouch’s “Soon and Very Soon” at funerals when he was a boy, the song filled him with joy. That’s reflected in his sparkling version here. Kenneth Morris’s “Christ Is All” was one of the first hymns he learned to read (from a hymnal) and play. “It was very cool to be able to bring it back and arrange it all these years later.”
The popular a cappella group Take Six’s rendering of Ralph Carmichael’s “A Quiet Place” was his introduction to the hymn. “I sang it in an a cappella group as a younger kid in middle school. I didn’t have any notions of being a musician or anything like that. It was just a song that I loved.” The same can be said of “Amazing Grace,” which Smith adapts to stirring effect on his original tune, “Gracefully.” “It kind of gives me this energy of how do we approach our challenges?” he says. “How do we travel through difficult spaces? How do we respond to adversity? And the answer is gracefully.”
“Mitch’s Moves,” the bluesy final “chapter” in The Book of Enoch, Vol. 1, was written by the protean Philadelphia pianist, composer, and producer Parris Bowens. “That song is really to shed light on just how far across the musical universe the influence of jazz and gospel have spread,” says Smith. “You know, here’s a guy who would never be considered a jazz musician at all in any jazz circles. But when you listen to him playing, you’re like, man, he has definitely been influenced by this music in addition to being another guy who grew up playing in the church.
“Unfortunately, we’ll never know what the rest of his story would have been. [Bowens died tragically at 40, during the Covid pandemic.] But it’s kind of my tribute to his great musicianship and the way he inspired a whole generation of young gospel musicians.”
Enoch Smith Jr. was born on November 24, 1978, in Rochester, New York. Following in the footsteps of his father, who had sung in a gospel quartet, he began singing in the children’s choir of his Pentecostal church when he was three. He played trumpet in middle school and drums in church and sang in the concert choir. At 14, he began teaching himself how to play piano. Even though he couldn’t read music, playing by ear, he became the church’s substitute pianist. 
“Choir was my homeroom,” he says. “I spent my lunch periods there sitting at the piano and plucking things out and figuring things out.”
While attending Berklee, he started to look for paying church gigs. Only when he auditioned at Baptist churches did he discover how big the Christian religion was. “I didn’t know many Baptists growing up,” he says. “I was amazed to find out that they wrote their songs down in hymnals and all their songs were in books. I grew up in a church that didn’t have hymnals. I didn’t know what it was.”
 
He initially planned on going to law school, having interned at Rochester law firms while in high school, and “maybe playing basketball.” Syracuse University was his first choice. His high school teacher and choir director convinced Enoch to think about attending music school and arranged an audition for him at the Berklee School of Music in Boston. During a class field trip there, while the rest of the choir was off doing the sights, Smith did his audition. “They accepted me on the spot,” he says. But fitting in proved difficult. 

“I felt like a misfit,” he says. “Everyone else was so advanced and there I was learning how to read music on the fly and trying to pass all the proficiency exams.” He was up to the challenge, but the more he focused on technique, he found, the more he fell out of touch with his curious sense of musical adventure. The challenge was to work his way back to where he could play “with the same feeling that I had when I started.”

Home from college after his first year at Berklee, he bought a $200 spinet, his first piano, had it delivered to his mother’s place, and devoted himself to his craft all summer at home and at church. 

His first album, Church Boy (2010), which includes striking arrangements of the Beach Boys hit “God Only Knows” and Dizzy Gillespie’s “Con Alma,” dips into Cuban and Caribbean sounds with horns and Latin percussion. Misfits (2011) is a trio effort featuring vocalists including Sarah Elizabeth Charles, Saunders Sermons, and Mavis Poole (Enoch’s then seven-year-old daughter Simone Smith makes a sweet appearance on one track). Misfits II (2015) focuses on pop music with covers of such tunes as Joan Osborne’s heavenly meditation “One of Us” and the Beatles’ “Yesterday” while plumbing gospel truths via two arrangements of Shirley Caesar’s “Sweeping Through the City.” The Quest: Live at APC (2016) captures his trio in its element, before a congregation.

“You know, I’ve never loved the scene itself,” Smith says. “I've just always loved creating music.” Being enveloped in the world of martial arts has added immeasurably to his creativity, “in terms of being calm under pressure and struggling through difficult places and having to repeat things and have discipline in a way that it built. Once you’ve gotten close to or found mastery in a thing, it’s definitely transferable. So, there are a lot of lessons that I learned.”
In addition to all his other endeavors, Smith has composed music for independent films and actually appeared in one as another of his heroes, Thelonious Monk, in a thesis project by a New York University student about Monk’s relationship with his patron the Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter. More recently, he worked with RZA of the Wu-Tang Clan on his latest “Bobby Digital” release and on Season 3 of their Hulu series.
Ultimately, the music, and what it brings forth, comes first. “I’m hoping to just add something to this beautiful landscape that people can say, wow, these are great arrangements,” Smith says. “You know, these are great songs. These songs feel good. These songs make me feel good.”  •