Stuff Smith and Oscar Peterson

(Poll Winners Records PWR 27222)

THE violin has often struggled in a jazz context but no musician had a greater impact in establishing it as a jazz instrument than Hezekiah Leroy Gordon “Stuff” Smith, who was born in Portsmouth, Ohio, in 1909. 

His father, who was both a barber and a violinist, and his pianist mother taught him music as a child and put him in the family band.

It was hearing Louis Armstrong play Savoy Blues while he was on a music scholarship at university in Charlotte, North Carolina, that signalled a lifetime in jazz, and at the age of 15 he became a professional musician.

He lived in Buffalo as a young man, eventually played with Jelly Roll Morton, and after moving to New York in 1936 he pioneered the amplified violin and led a quintet at the renowned Onyx Club with drummer Cozy Cole and trumpeter Jonah Jones. 

During the post-war years he made some stunning records with Nat King Cole, Dizzy Gillespie and Sun Ra and spent the last two years of a hectic touring and recording life in Copenhagen from 1965-7, where he made a series of fine albums with Danish musicians and fellow US expatriates like pianist Kenny Drew and drummer Wallace Bishop.

The joint session he made with Oscar Peterson in Los Angeles in March 1957 has been unavailable for many years, so its reissue on the Poll Winners label is a real gift from more than half a century ago.

“Play in tune. And play from the heart always,” declared Stuff, and both principles are exemplified all through this album, which in addition to Smith and the great Montreal-born Peterson has Barney Kessel on guitar, drummer Alvin Stoller and the virtuoso bassist of the bop age, Ray Brown, born in 1926 in Pittsburgh.

Stuff’s husky, hoarse, hugely allusive and relentlessly swinging strings throb through the album from its very first notes. Desert Sands is the violinist’s tune and he is soon making his tracks, forging a union immediately with Peterson, his kindred spirit of swing, whose solo verve soon follows Stuff’s choruses with the undisguised quotations, this time from Pretty Baby and Joshua.

Fletcher Henderson’s Soft Winds, associated with Benny Goodman, follows and Stuff makes it his own, with a flickering guitar chorus from Kessel and a softly twanging, bouncing solo from Brown.

The first of three Ellington tunes, Things Ain’t What They Used To Be, follows, with a bluesy chorus from Peterson before Stuff gets to do business, his grating, rasping beauty finding its crescendo.

On to It Don’t Mean A Thing If I Ain’t Got That Swing, and no-one was more qualified to play it than Stuff Smith. 

Peterson was a contender too and his chorus rocks the studio before Stuff comes frolicking in with huge zest and rhythm. 

The much slower Stuff tune Time and Again calms the confreres down a little but not for long as they sally into I Know That You Know with all strings blazing and Stuff in stop-time daring all through his chorus.

There were only six tracks on the original album, but this reissue includes those there was no room for plus two extra with the crawling-hands pianist from Indianapolis, Carl Perkins, recorded in Los Angeles in the same year.

More Ellington and the Ben Webster tenor sax feature, In a Mellow Tone, is swinging meat and drink to Stuff, with Ray Brown shadowing his exposition of the familiar theme and Kessel cutting a neatly picked solo.

Heatwave gives a rampaging Peterson his true swinging head and 10-and-a-half minutes of Body and Soul explores the finesse of Stuff’s string artistry as well as Peterson’s exquisite lyricism.

The two tracks with Perkins are both Stuff originals. Calypso doesn’t have much of a Trinidad feel, but Stuff peals off his notes with fire and force and Perkins’s solo is full of invention.

I Wrote My Song is waltz-like and Stuff’s violin is almost weeping, its tune uncovering what seems to be an uncharacteristic sadness, for who knows the flesh and blood of the real life beating inside that extraordinary and infectious veneer of unmitigated swing?