Stuff Smith

Stuff Smith was an innovator of jazz violin and a leading figure of small group combos and jumpin’ entertainment in the 1930's.

Stuff Smith derived a deep, driving, sound on his fiddle, with unique voicings, heartfelt tones, and a fluid, driving sense of rhythm and swing that enraptured the soul.

He was a dynamic showman, a humorous vocalist with hit novelty songs such as “I’se A Muggin’”, “You’re A Viper”, and “Knock Knock Who’s There”. As his biographer Anthony Barnett has perceptively noted, Smith could fulfill the roles of comic jive at the same time as being a serious, investigative musician, like his hero Louis Armstrong, his pal Fats Waller, and his protégé Dizzy Gillespie.

Hezekiah Leroy Smith was born in Portsmouth, Ohio in 1909 to a middle class black family, his father a barber, mother a teacher, and both musically inclined. “Stuff” was a childhood nickname. His older sister played classical music, but Smith followed his father, who had a band that played for popular local dances. In his early teens he moved to study at Johnson C. Smith University in North Carolina, but with his footloose bent, discarded formal training and left school to go on the road as a professional musician.

Stuff’s first major experience was the Alphonso Trent orchestra, a traveling “Territory Band”, in the late 1920's. Settling in Buffalo, New York in 1930, Smith became a leading figure in the local African-American musical and business community, directing bands and nightclubs along with Jimmie Lunceford and Lil Hardin Armstrong.

Smith moved to New York City in 1936.  Fronting a small combo including Jonah Jones he became an immediate sensation at the Onyx Club on fabled 52nd Street and made hit records.

Among other highlights, in the late 1950's Smith joined up with the impresario Norman Granz, who presented Stuff on records with Ella Fitzgerald, Dizzy Gillespie, Oscar Peterson, Stephane Grappelli and the like, and on concert tours with the Jazz At The Philharmonic.  Later, Smith took up residence with Joe Bushkin in a storied and sophisticated engagement at the Embers.

He then went to Europe, moving to Copenhagen in 1965, with many other American jazz expatriates, and Stuff Smith developed a great following there. However, suffering from various health problems that had lingered, he died shortly after his 58th birthday, on September 25, 1967.

originally broadcast December 17, 2017

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