Louis Smith

Louis Smith stood out as a skilled yet seldom-documented straight-ahead bop trumpeter who helmed a pair of sessions during the 1950s before stepping away to instruct at the University of Michigan and within the Ann Arbor public schools. He devoted the bulk of his professional life to education, pausing only for a short-lived return to performance in the late 1970s that once again gave way to classroom duties. Not until the middle of the 1990s did he commit fully to recording again, issuing multiple titles on the Steeplechase imprint.

Born in Memphis, Tennessee, Smith took up the trumpet during his teenage years. After earning a high-school diploma that carried a scholarship to Tennessee State University, he pursued music studies there and joined the Tennessee State Collegians. Upon completing his undergraduate degree, he undertook additional graduate coursework at Tennessee before moving to the University of Michigan, where he trained under Clifford Lillya. While at Michigan he sat in with visiting artists such as Miles Davis and Dizzy Gillespie. Drafted into the Army in January 1954, he completed roughly eighteen months of service and, upon discharge in late 1955, accepted a teaching post at Booker T. Washington High School in Atlanta, Georgia. Even while employed there, he maintained an active schedule of bop and hard-bop club dates, sharing bandstands with Cannonball Adderley, Kenny Dorham, Donald Byrd, Lou Donaldson, Zoot Sims, and Philly Joe Jones, among numerous others.

His first appearance on record came in 1956 as a sideman on Kenny Burrell’s Swingin’. The following year he assembled a quintet—featuring Cannonball Adderley under the pseudonym Buckshot La Funke, bassist Doug Watkins, drummer Art Taylor, and pianists Duke Jordan and Tommy Flanagan alternating—for a leader date on Tom Wilson’s Boston-based Transition label. Before the album could be issued, Transition ceased operations; Blue Note’s Alfred Lion acquired the masters, placed Smith under contract, and released the material as Here Comes Louis Smith. Throughout 1958 the trumpeter contributed to two further Blue Note sessions—Kenny Burrell’s Blue Lights and Booker Little’s Booker Little 4 and Max Roach—while also leading the date later issued as Smithville. That concentrated period of activity proved to be his sole recorded output for the next two decades.

Smith eventually returned to the Ann Arbor, Michigan vicinity, resuming teaching duties at both the University of Michigan and local public schools. Between 1978 and 1979 he recorded the albums Just Friends and Prancin’ before once more withdrawing into education. A decade afterward he reentered the studio, first appearing on Mickey Tucker’s Sweet Lotus Lips in 1989, then signing with Steeplechase and cutting Ballads for Lulu the next year. After a four-year hiatus he produced Silvering and Strike Up the Band in 1994. The Very Thought of You followed in 1995, I Waited for You appeared the year after, and There Goes My Heart was released in 1997. Having retired from teaching, Smith experienced a stroke in 2006; thereafter he regularly attended performances at Southeastern Michigan jazz venues yet never resumed playing or recording. He passed away in Ann Arbor in August 2016.