Photo credit: Ollie Hayward

Saxophonist and composer Tom Smith is set to release his big band album on Friday 21st February. Featuring some of the finest musicians in the UK, and some fiery writing for the ensemble, this is an album worth making some noise about.

In composing the nine pieces heard on the album, Smith presents a contemporary big band sound that draws on influences including Guy Barker, Maria Schneider and Pat Metheny among others.

Prior to the release of A Year In The Life, we invited the saxophonist to pick his favourite albums. Of his selection, Tom says:

“Here are 10 albums which have massively influenced me over the years. I hesitate to call these a definitive top 10 – day to day tastes can change and it’s impossible to call any one album the ‘best’ – these albums are certainly 10 of my favourites which I return to time and time again. I’ve chosen to avoid (with one exception..) a lot of classic recordings because while I deeply love the late 50s/60s Blue Note and beyond catalogues, these days I find myself listing to more bootleg and live recordings of artists from this era, so I thought it would be fun to delve into some more modern recordings for this list! These have all shaped my journey as a saxophonist and composer, and you can hear their influence in my upcoming big band record ‘A Year In The Life’.”

Chris Potter – Follow The Red Line

A live performance by Chris’ Underground Quartet so good that you can almost taste the vibe in the room. There’s so much synergy between these musicians (Craig Taborn, Adam Rogers and Nate Smith), and the tunes give them so much to work with; Chris is my favourite saxophonist by a country mile, I could listen to him forever and this particular recording really shows him at the top of his game. He’s widely regarded as the technical master of the saxophone of the modern age, but this recording proves he is also a complete master of emotion, melody and rhythm – there’s rhythmic phrasing in his playing that drummers would envy. This recording is absolutely steeped in vibe from the audience and it has been captured beautifully! The compositions are brilliant too, they give the improvisers the perfect amount of material to work with while allowing them to stretch out and take the music all sorts of places.

Darcy James Argue – Brooklyn Babylon

When I first heard this album, I couldn’t quite believe the sounds Darcy was able to get out of a (nearly) traditional big band lineup. This concept album follows a narrative of how the construction of a building in Brooklyn affects the various communities who live around it, and the genius here is how well all the various strands of the composition tie into the story and forward the narrative. There’s several leitmotifs that are woven through the story which get transformed into so many different genres – you get a sense of a Balkan community, a Bohemian group, a group of local builders, all responding to the changing scene around them. I really love how Darcy allows some very small group interludes to allow these colours to shine through and he lets you come to your own conclusion about how you feel. Some stunning soloing too on this from Ingrid Jensen, John Ellis, Sam Sadigursky and Ryan Keberle. Darcy’s writing has been a huge influence on my own big band writing, it’s just stunning.

Maria Schneider – Sky Blue

Oh, how to pick one Maria Schneider album for this list…I adore Maria’s writing for big band, and her albums span so many moods it’s hard to pick a definitive one, in many ways it could be The Thompson Fields or the more recent Data Lords, but I’ve listened to this album so much it has to be Sky Blue. The album is filled with beautiful pastoral scenes of all types, and she’s another big band writer who makes such clever use of the textures and sounds available to her. Cerulean Skies is extra special on this, and Donny McCaslin and Charles Pillow play remarkable solos. Ingrid Jensen (welcome back!) and Steve Wilson also astonish with their soloing, there’s so much you can discover in this music.

Guy Barker – The Amadeus Project

The album that started it all for me, Guy Barker’s Amadeus Project is just SO much fun, I saw it performed when I was a teenager and that was the experience that made me think “I really want to play music for the rest of my life” – since then I’ve spent my life trying to work with as many big bands as I can, and I’m sure if you listen to this album you’ll hear more than a few similarities with my music!

It’s a loose big band re-working of the story of Mozart’s Magic Flute (not the music), complete with a noir narrator telling us the story of Bobby Timino, a trumpet player from the Bronx behind on his debt repayments. That sets the stage for Dan ‘The Viper’ Viperati to come to the club itching for a fight, you get the picture…  The big band writing is gritty and exciting and has an incredible film-like quality to it, I come back to it often to try and figure out what it is that gives it its intensity. Just fabulous fun and I really hope one day he lets the world hear it live again!

Colin Stetson – New History Warfare vol 2

Colin is another favourite saxophonist of mine, he’s developed an entirely new way of playing the instrument which I’ve never seen anyone else attempt – typically playing on the unusual bass saxophone, Colin starts by circular breathing (a method of sustaining a note on a saxophone forever by inhaling through your nose while simultaneously pushing air out of your mouth) to play everlasting drone-like ostinatos through the instrument. Layer two begins when he starts singing down the instrument as well, amplified by a contact microphone he wears on a collar around his neck. The THIRD layer is achieved with microphones attached to the body of the saxophone which he strategically uses to amplify the percussive mechanical sound of the keywork moving up and down. In addition to all the above he uses very advanced voicing techniques to allow harmonics to pop out at various points, and in the studio he uses over 20 microphones positioned at various points in the room to give an incredible depth to the soundscape of the recording, positioning the audience up close to the instrument, far away, panning through left and right to give a rippling effect.

If the above sounds complicated or contrived, then the results are anything but – the music is sublime, scary, powerful, sweet, overwhelming, and so new. You’ll never hear music like this elsewhere because there’s no one in the world capable of making it!

Duke Ellington – Live at Newport

The one classic entry on this list, Ellington’s big band sounds so so good on this recording. There is a wealth of history and context behind this performance; the big band’s popularity was waning, half the musicians didn’t even make it to the first set, the band was angered by being pulled off stage early – you could make a film about the surrounding circumstances. Then by the time they come up to do their second set, they are all primed to go all guns blazing, and Paul Gonsalves takes a 27 chorus blues solo which just whips the crowd up into a frenzy and nearly causes a riot… It’s remarkable music making all round by any account but what sets this album apart from all the others is how plainly you can hear both the tension and the pure unfettered joy in both the band and the audience. Hearing the roar when Ellington introduces Johnny Hodges is a beautiful moment. The big band playing is supremely raucous and brash throughout – no one can touch Ellington.

Steve Swallow – Damaged In Transit

A terrific live trio album featuring Chris Potter and Adam Nussbaum, the songs Steve has written for this are so peculiar but they work on a really deep level. The performances are super-charged and everyone is on fire, but this album has far more delicate moments than you would imagine from this trio. Steve’s songs here aren’t given full titles, they are labelled Parts 1 to 9, and they range from angular bluesy melodies to melancholic ballads. Occasionally when listening to trio records I find myself missing the comping instrument, but these tunes have been written so cleverly with contrapuntal movement, chordal implications, and perfect intervals between the melody line and the bass notes that there’s nothing missing here at all. Chris is at his fiery best, and Steve is sat making these incredibly complicated chord sequences sound as easy as pie. I’ve performed a tribute to this concert a couple of times with drummer Jay Davis and bassist Joe Lee and we’re consistently shocked by how hard it is to play these sequences well, they make it sound so effortless on the recording!

Eric Harland – Voyager Live By Night

I was lucky enough to see this band live in NY around the time they recorded this album, yet another example of the live recording capturing something that you would never get in the studio. The band consists of some of the best around (Walter Smith III, Taylor Eigisti, Julian Lage and Harish Raghavan), and they all feel so connected with the music on this record. The melodies of the tunes are really beautiful in their simplicity and the rhythmic components are so exciting and driving, and the band allows each tune the space to develop as much as it needs to. Both burning and incredibly free! I wish I was playing in a band like this.

Pat Metheny – From This Place

I’ve been a longtime Pat lover, and this recent album really encapsulates so much of his career to date. He recorded a new set of unrehearsed music in his quartet with Gwilym Simcock, Linda May Han Oh and Antonio Sanchez and then added orchestral arrangements on top of these free-wheeling sessions. These arrangements add so much depth and richness and serve to heighten the small group performance, never getting in the way. Clever touches where clearly improvised lines get worked into the orchestral string arrangements really make this pop, and there’s some quite abstract modern compositional ideas going on in the orchestra. It’s some of my favourite Metheny small group writing as well, the melodies and bass lines in America Undefined (the clear standout for me with a drop that a literal train drives through – stunningly creative music making), Wide and Far and Pathmaker are really fun and expansive and take you on a journey, a quality of Pat’s music making I’ve always admired. He lets You Are builds from absolutely nothing to an intense emotional climax with such clever use of a simple building melody and chord relationship – there’s so little material used and it’s masterful how he controls it all.

Kurt Rosenwinkel – Our Secret World

Kurt partners with the OJM (Orchestra de Jazz Matosinhos from Portugal) for this album, featuring a collection of his previously recorded songs given fresh big band arrangements by various arrangers from the orchestra. The way these songs have been expanded is beautifully done, the intro to the Cloister and the middle bridge section to Dream of The Old enhance the music so much, it feels seamless how the songs have been expanded and the band has a really unique vibe to how they play. It’s chaotic yet mannered, and that gives Kurt (the main soloist throughout) a great bed on which to stretch out on his compositions. The guitar playing is some of the best ever recorded, I think that’s fair to say. His solo on Zhivago especially is breathtaking, his control of the flow of ideas is immense, and he’s constantly reacting to what the orchestra is playing – a perfect partnership. As with Eric Harland’s band I was lucky enough to see this live at Birdland in NY and it blew my socks off.

Tom Smith Big Band  – A Year In The Life is released on Fey Moose Records

 The album is released on CD, digital & double vinyl on Friday 21 February 2025