Tommy Smith first played the Queen’s Hall in Edinburgh as a teenager in the early 1980s. In the more than forty years since, he has played the venue very many times, with his own bands and as part of the Scottish National Jazz Orchestra, and he has shared the stage with some of the greats of contemporary jazz – Chick Corea & Gary Burton, Branford Marsalis, Maria Schneider, Joe Lovano, John Scofield, Courtney Pine, John Taylor – and that’s just the gigs which spring to mind.
Smith has for a long while played duos with pianists. He regularly performed with the late Brian Kellock, a relationship which produced three CDs, as well as with John Taylor, Makoto Ozone and Fergus McCreadie.
For this performance at the Queen’s Hall, released as a download less than a month after the show, he was joined by pianist Gwilym Simcock. And as the notes accompanying the download make clear, “it marked Smith’s final performance in Scotland”. If this was announced on the night, I missed it, and listening to the recording now adds an even greater poignancy.
Smith and Simcock focus on original tunes, in contrast to Smith’s earlier collaborations with pianists, with two new pieces by Simcock, and five by Smith spanning his career. They regularly perform together: their familiarity with the material and each other is evident, as is their ease at improvising. Both players take the music off on tangents, exploring where they could take it. Each piece evolves, the end point some distance from the start. The creative energy from both is evident in the recording.
The artists produce some wonderful playing throughout the record. Smith’s ‘Body Or Soul’ [sic] is a highlight, starting as a mournful ballad before becoming a fast-paced work-out; both sections stand out. Simcock’s playing on his own ‘Old Husbands‘ Tale’ and on Smith’s ‘Harlequin’ is sublime. The title track, ‘Eternal Light’, is gorgeous, and full of longing.
In recent years, Tommy Smith has taken the opportunities arising from the transition of listening to music from the physical realm to the digital. He has made much of his long discography available to download, including most recently his first album, Giant Strides, recorded in 1983. In addition, he has released previously unavailable material – including an album of duets recorded with pianist John Taylor back in 2003. His habit of recording live shows makes one wonder what other gems he has in his archive.
Until then, in the absence of future dates in Edinburgh, we have Eternal Light to remind us.
