Jazz Articles about Stuff Smith

Fit As A Fiddle: How The Violin Helped Shape Jazz, Part 1

by Peter Rubie
December 23, 2021

Part 1 | Part 2 That was then... Considering jazz is an art form that mostly makes it up as it goes along, it's ironically appropriate that printed records--i.e., data--from the days of its birth are decidedly sparse. We know, at least, that during the 18th and 19th Centuries in New Orleans white plantation owners, one afternoon a week, allowed their African slaves time off to play their music and dance together. This music, direct from Africa, albeit ...

Stuff Smith: Stuff Smith & Oscar Peterson

by AAJ Italy Staff
September 12, 2011

La storia del violino nel jazz è curiosa. Strumento centrale nell'esperienza afroamericana durante lo schiavismo, resta importante all'inizio del '900 nelle formazioni di ragtime orchestrale. Poi, con l'arrivo delle big band e la diffusione delle musiche di New Orleans, scompare soffocato da sezioni ritmiche e gruppi di fiati sempre più potenti. I pochi solisti di pregio sopravvissuti a questo cambiamento appaiono legati alle tradizioni europee classiche e folk, pensiamo a Joe Venuti e Stephane Grappelli. Stuff Smith è uno dei ...

Stuff Smith: Five Fine Violins Celebrating 100 Years

by Chris Mosey
February 11, 2010

Featured here in his twilight years, violinist Hezekiah Leroy Gordon “Stuff" Smith was born in Portsmouth, Ohio in 1909. Before he died in Denmark in 1967, he became one of the jazz world's most colorful characters, performing on occasion with a parrot on his shoulder and playing with everyone from Alphonso Trent's minstrel band to Dizzy Gillespie and Oscar Peterson. Career-wise, Stuff Smith peaked with his Onyx Club Boys in the 1930s, when he set out to ...

Stuff Smith: The Complete Tenor Sax Septets & Masters of Jazz

by George Kanzler
January 13, 2007

Stuff Smith The Complete Tenor Sax Septets Ab Fable 2006 Stuff Smith Masters of Jazz Storyville 2006

These two albums give us snapshots of violinist and vocalist Stuff Smith at the apex and finale of his career in jazz. That career started in the '20s - when he, like ...

Stuff Smith: Swingin' Stuff

by Ken Dryden
February 6, 2006

Stuff Smith: Hot Stuff

by Florence Wetzel
January 8, 2005

After a long career in the United States, the great jazz violinist Stuff Smith (1909-67) moved to Copenhagen in 1965. Many recordings exist from this fertile period in Smith's career. The new CD Hot Stuff is a reissue of the previously out-of-print Live at Montmarte , recorded in 1965, combined with four tracks from Hot Violins , recorded in 1966. Live at Montmarte is a concert from Copenhagen's Jazzhus Montmarte and features Kenny Drew on piano, Niels-Henning ...

Stuff Smith: Swing Violinist

by AAJ Staff
October 9, 2002

From the 1995-2003 archive: This article first appeared at All About Jazz in 2002. When Hezekiah Leroy Gordon “Stuff" Smith picked up the violin, the house began to rock. The second major popularizer of the violin in jazz after Joe Venuti, Stuff received great success with his small high energy swing band in the Thirties. His choice of instrument was rare in jazz, but because of it's natural flexibility Stuff was able to give the violin a strong, ...