Crossing Borders & Playing with Pioneers: My Life in Music is Warren Smith’s aptly titled autobiography published by Giant Steps Press and due out on the Fall of 2021. Jazz drummer, conservatory trained percussionist, founding member of the percussion ensemble M’Boom, composer, arranger, bandleader, Loft Era proprietor of Studio WIS and among the first generation of jazz educators at the university level, Smith is also a marvelous raconteur. He weaves hilarious anecdotes and insider information into a larger narrative about contemporary music, its giants and historical events with which he comes into contact over seven decades.
In “Part One, Sweet Home, Chicago,” Smith recounts his birth in 1934 during the Great Depression, his loving musical family and his growing up in a segregated Chicago amidst bombs tossed at Black homes, like his, located at a geographical border. In a voice humorous, earthy and insightful, he re-creates the 1930s and 40s and his musical apprenticeships with the family band, his high school concert and marching bands and his undergraduate studies at the University of Illinois at Champaign/Urbana with Paul Price’s percussion ensemble and avant-garde composer Harry Partch’s residency. Nevertheless, he’s told by his instructors that there is no room for a Negro in classical music or on Broadway and that jazz is considered too unsophisticated for study at the college level.
However, “Part Two, New York City: Jazz Mecca” reveals Smith’s uncanny good fortune in being at the right place at the right time with the right musical gifts. After a summer fellowship at Tanglewood, he receives a scholarship from the Manhattan School of Music. He marries his childhood sweetheart Mary. They move to the Big Apple where he graduates with a Master’s degree in percussion a year later and finds employment on Broadway in the highly coveted percussion chair for West Side Story. The only Black musician in the orchestra pit, he then tours the States with the show for eighteen months as the drummer and section leader. The score by Leonard Bernstein is the most challenging of the fifty Broadway and off-Broadway shows he will play over the next forty years, and it leads to performing with musical pioneers like Harry Belafonte, Lena Horne, Gil Evans, Charles Mingus, Aretha Franklin, Nina Simone, Nat King Cole, Nancy Wilson, Carmen McRae, Lloyd Price, Barbra Streisand, Quincy Jones and Joe Zawinul, among others. He forms his own band, Composer’s Workshop Ensemble, which he keeps together to this day.
A master improviser and reader on all of the standard orchestral percussion instruments and the drum set, his work in the recording studio soon shifts from playing jingles to playing with John Cage, George Russell, Anthony Braxton, Gladys Knight and the Pips, Marvin Gaye and Tammy Terrell, Van Morrison, The Fugs, The Last Poets, Roberta Flack, Judy Collins, Elvin Jones, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Julius Hemphill, Count Basie and others spanning over 3,000 recording dates. He opens Studio WIS in 1967 as a performance and rehearsal space, one of the longest running and most respected of the Loft Era.
As for education, after getting kicked out of the high school music room for daring to improvise on an idea, he becomes a music teacher for New York’s Board of Ed in 1959. Ten years later, he chairs the Black Studies department and teaches music at Adelphi University. He leaves the program two years later to join the faculty of Ken McIntyre’s African American music and performing arts program at SUNY/Old Westbury, the first of its kind in the USA, where he teaches for the next 25 years.
In “Part Three: Touring the World” Smith becomes the musical director for Janis Joplin and tours Europe with her band, an experience he follows up with many more tours of Europe, Asia and Africa—with the Negro Ensemble Company, Sam Rivers, Tony Williams, Gil Evans, Muhal Richard Abrams and M’Boom, the percussion ensemble created by pioneer Max Roach which Smith considers his greatest achievement. He joins the Mercer-led Duke Ellington band and plays with them for seven years. Still quite active in the music scene at 88 and an inspiration to younger musicians, Smith ends his memoir with a celebration of his family of five daughters and their children that brings readers back to Chicago’s South Side and the enduring values of family and legacy in the pursuit of crossing borders and playing with pioneers.
Books
Please click the covers to get more information and to purchase:
Warren Smith’s Band
Composers Workshop Ensemble
Warren Smith And Composer’s Workshop Ensemble
Strata-East
Avant-garde Jazz, Free Jazz
1973
Cricket Song-Poem
Warren Smith And The Composer’s Workshop Ensemble
Miff Music Company
Free Jazz, Soul-Jazz
1982
Old News Borrowed Blues
Warren Smith, Composer’s Workshop Ensemble
Engine Studios
Free Improvisation
2009
Solo Albums
Dragon Dave Meets Prince Black Knight from the Darkside of the Moon
Porter Records
Free Jazz, Soul-Jazz, Jazz-Funk, Spoken Word, Non-Music
2011
Partnered Albums
Ain’t That Loving You Baby/Birds
Producer: Warren Smith and Richard Elderson
CIA
Jazz, Funk / Soul, Blues, Pop, Folk, World, & Country
1966
Untempered Trio
Bill Cole, Warren Smith, Joe Daley
Shadrack
Free Improvisation, Avant-garde Jazz
1992
Heaven Help Us All [info]
Claire Daly with Solar: Vibraphone, Percussion, Guest – Warren Smith
Daly Bread Records
Jazz
2004
Proverbs For Sam
Bill Cole’s Untempered Ensemble: Percussion, Marimba, Voice, Whistle – Warren Smith
Boxholder Records
Free Improvisation
2008
Tribute to Albert Ayler Live at the Dynamo
Joe McPhee / Roy Campbell / William Parker / Warren Smith
Marge
Free Jazz
2009
Parrhesia [info]
Stephen Haynes: Drums, Percussion, Marimba, Voice – Warren Smith
Music By – Morris*, Haynes*, Smith*
Engine Studios
Free Improvisation
2010
Universal Sounds [info]
Odean Pope: Drums, Percussion, Timpani, Vocals – Warren Smith
Porter Records
Free Jazz
2011
Odd Time
Eugene Chadbourne & Warren Smith
Engine Studios
Jazz, Rock, Folk, World, & Country: Bluegrass, Free Improvisation, Experimental
2011
Honeymoon On Saturn
Track 4: The Call Of Love’s True NameGlockenspiel [Solo] – Warren Smith
CIMP
Contemporary Jazz
2012
Creative Music For 3 Bass Saxophones
Scott Robinson , Vinny Golia, J.D.Parran, Warren Smith
ScienSonic
Contemporary Jazz
2012
The Sea Of Modicum
Andrew Lamb, Warren Smith, Arkadijus Gotesmanas
NoBuisness Records
Free Jazz
2017
The Balance (Vision Festival XV+)
AUM Fidelity
Free Jazz, Free Improvisation
2018
The Spell: The Vincent Chancey Trio Live, 1987
Vincent Chancey / Wilber Morris / Warren Smith
NoBuisness Records
Free Jazz
2020
Featured
Jazz of the Seventies: Una Muy Bonita
Sam Rivers Tuba Trio* with Joe Daley & Warren Smith / Earl Cross Sextet with Jimmy Vass*, Daoud Haroon, Ronnie Boykins, Juma Sultan, Roger Blank / J.L. March
Circle Records
Free Jazz
1977
The Art of the Ballad
Track 6: Descent Into Kangnung –Warren Smith
Mapleshade Records
Bop, Avant-garde Jazz, Fusion
1999
East Of Broadway: A Benefit For Fourth Arts Block
Track 17: Ten Thousand Things –Warren Smith
Self- Released
Classical, Folk, World, & Country, Jazz, Pop, Rock
2005
The Complete Remastered Recordings On Black Saint & Soul Note [info]
Track 5-1 to 5-7-Warren Smith
Black Saint
Jazz
2012
Forward Festival 2017 Mixtape
Track 7: Mirage – Andrew Lamb (2) & Warren Smith
Forward Festival
Electronic, Free Improvisation, Free Jazz, Modern Classical
2017
Singles & EPs
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