Louis Smith (musician)

Edward Louis Smith ( born May 20, 1931 in Memphis ( Tennessee)) is an American jazz trumpeter and flugelhorn player and teacher and high school teacher.

Life and work

Louis Smith began as a teenager playing the trumpet, at first strongly influenced by Fats Navarro. After his high school graduation, he studied with a scholarship to Tennessee State University and then moved to the University of Michigan; During this time he played with musicians such as gas- animal Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, Thad Jones and Billy Mitchell. In January 1954, he was drafted into the United States Army. After his release end of 1955 he taught at the Booker T. Washington High School in Atlanta and played next to hard bop in local clubs, and a with Cannonball Adderley, Kenny Dorham, Donald Byrd, Lou Donaldson, Phineas Newborn, Zoot Sims and Philly Joe Jones.

In 1956 he had the opportunity to take part in recordings by Kenny Burrell in the album Swingin. On February 9, 1958, he set his first session for the small Boston label transition, in which he was accompanied by " Buckshot La Funke " (aka Cannonball Adderley ), Duke Jordan and Tommy Flanagan, Doug Watkins and Art Taylor as well. However, the transition label disappeared from the market, before Smith's album could appear; Blue Note chief Alfred Lion acquired the master tapes of transition and signed a record contract with Smith and published the session under the title of Here Comes Louis Smith, was developed by the decoupled also a single with the songs " Tribute To Brownie " c / w " Stardust ".

During the year 1958, the trumpeter then played on two other Blue Note Sessions - Kenny Burrell Blue Lights and Booker Little's Booker Little 4 and Max Roach and was on 30 March another album import under his own name, which appeared as Smithville. His teammates were here Charlie Rouse, Sonny Clark, Paul Chambers and Art Taylor again. In July 1958 Smith joined as a member of the Horace Silver Quintet at the Newport Jazz Festival.

Smith then retired but as an active musician back, went back to Ann Arbor (Michigan) and taught full-time from now at the University of Michigan and the nearby Ann Arbor Public School. It was not until the late 1970s, he had a brief comeback with several albums for Steeplechase Records, where, inter alia, George Coleman, Harold Mabern, Junior Cook, Roland Hanna, Sam Jones and Billy Hart participated. After another break of over ten years, he went from early 1990, again for Steeplechase into the studio and played a number of other albums a, Ballads for Lulu (1990 ) with Jim McNeely, Strike up the Band (1991 ) with Vincent Herring and Kevin Hays and finally in 1993 as a reminiscence of his time with Horace Silver album Silvering with the Chicago veterans Von Freeman, Jodie Christian and Wilbur Campbell. In 1997 he released his last album There Goes My Heart; 2005 Louis Smith suffered a stroke that robbed him of his ability to speak.