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‘Jazz was from its beginnings, a radical act of political resistance’

Chris Searle speaks with pianist CORY SMYTHE

NOT since the 1960 civil rights days of the release of Max Roach’s epochal album We Insist! with its sleeve photograph of the desegregation of a Jim Crow restaurant, have I seen such a thematic sleeve image as that of the album Smoke Gets in Your Eyes by the pianist/composer Cory Smythe, accompanied by the Trondheim Jazz Orchestra.

Russell Kaye’s revelatory photograph shows two canoeists struggling with river rapids, rowing past a huge forest fire on a riverbank in Manitoba province, Canada, while other pictures show singers and crooners, from Sarah Vaughan to Bryan Ferry, who have sung the song and its composers Jerome Kern and Otto Harbach. It creates an astonishing amalgam of the aural and visual.

Smythe was born in 1977, near Chicago. “My Dad would play the piano when he got home from working at the printing press, and I started emulating what he played when I was quite little,” he tells me.

“When I was about 10 my first jazz album was by The Yellowjackets. It took a bit before I figured out who Charlie Parker was.

“As a teenager I liked different kinds of music, but was especially consumed with chasing the feeling I got from Prince. I moved to New York City around 2004 to become a professional musician.”

I ask him about the artistic unity of the Smoke Gets in Your Eyes album.

“I think the sonic aspirations — molten, fluid — come first with the inescapable political concerns, which gradually suggested a connection with the Kern/Harbach standard.

“The solo piano music started as an attempt to find ways of getting the piano to produce something of the soundtrack of the ensemble music — modelling the piano after an orchestra or big band.

“The visual sleeve language is all thanks to producer David Breskin who sourced the cover art from the extraordinary photographer Russell Kaye.”

What was the crucial contribution of the Trondheim Jazz Orchestra?

“I originally wrote the piece for the uniquely brilliant collection of musicians we gathered for a gig in Trondheim. It’s filled with allusions and responses to their individual sounds.

“Getting more familiar with their music was a huge part of the compositional process and a beautifully illuminating experience for me.”

I remember from my boyhood the crooning poetry of the lyrics of Smoke Gets in Your Eyes — always on the radio. “When your heart’s on fire / You must realise / Smoke gets in your eyes.” 

I ask Cory about the ironic power it brings to his message.

“I’m interested in a kind of erasure of old(er) American songs and then trying to imagine a new musical language belonging to a new speculative musical culture growing from the remnants. I hope this would help me construct a listening experience more arresting, more seductively ambiguous than I might get to otherwise.”

The theme of struggling to prevent disastrous climate change reflects the 1950s and 1960s struggles that jazz musicians like Roach and Archie Shepp waged against racism.

Smythe’s album turns crooning sentiment on its head. Did he see a parallel commitment?

“I think the main idea I’ve been struck by and that I’ve been trying in some way to live up to, is something like this. When we think of ‘jazz,’ we’re thinking of music that was, from its beginnings, a radical act of political resistance against some of the most brutal and dangerous parts of American life.

“Jumping ahead a few decades — I think when Monk was improvising over a standard, stripping it for parts and creating new pieces from the remainder, leading an ensemble that turned the pre-existing tune in exhilarating palimpsests of newly, (often spontaneously) invented sonic language — that was political as well as musical commentary.”

For me, Smythe’s Smoke Gets in Your Eyes is lucid proof of Ellington’s dictum of the indivisibility of great music: that it is ‘beyond category.’ Beyond classical, beyond jazz, beyond avant-garde.

When I tell him that, he responds: “Absolutely (and thank you). And yet I worry about the problems those genre categories create or perpetuate, and I worry about the problems that arise when someone like me claims to transcend them. Sometimes it’s the same set of problems.”

But get hold of Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, with solo piano and ensemble in complete accord with an acrid and now-times warning about the jeopardy facing our world and the elitist power of those who control it for their own gruesome ends and steer us and those who come after towards catastrophe.

It is hauntingly beautiful music, but as my old friend Trevor Huddleston used to say, “Naught for our comfort.”

Smoke Gets In Your Eyes is released on Pyroclastic Records.

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