A stocky bearded figure, nicknamed “Mr Hefty Jazz”, who pointed his trumpet upwards as he played, in the manner of his hero Louis Armstrong, Keith Smith was a leading musician in the British revival of New Orleans jazz.
He was also an entrepreneur who devised several touring package shows that featured the music of, among others, Hoagy Carmichael, George Gershwin and Fats Waller, bringing live jazz to audiences across Europe with such stars as Elaine Delmar, Paul Jones and Georgie Fame.
He was also involved in record production, issuing rare recordings, albeit often of dubious provenance, by some of the most influential figures in traditional and mainstream jazz.
Keith John Smith was born in Isleworth, and while working as an apprentice draughtsman, he took up the trumpet at the age of 17 because it was the cheapest instrument in the local secondhand shop.
Horrified at the racket made by his son trying to teach himself, Smith’s father paid for lessons, and after six months the boy was able to play along with his favourite records by the New Orleans veterans Bunk Johnson and George Lewis. Not long afterwards, after taking his first steps at playing with a band in the Powder Mill Lane Stompers, he joined the clarinettist Norrie Cox, and drummer Alan Day in the San Jacinto Stompers. They performed in a former mission hall in Hanworth, Middlesex, which Day’s father bought for the purpose of opening a jazz club. Before long, the musicians had also launched a New Orleans-style marching ensemble, the New Taeo Brass Band, which Smith co-led with the drummer Barry Martyn, another keen revivalist.
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In 1962 Smith visited New Orleans for the first time, and struck up a friendship with George Lewis, with whom he later recorded. Moving on to California, he persuaded the veteran pianist Alton Purnell to make his first tour of Britain, which he did a little later that year, accompanied by Smith’s own Climax Jazz Band. After bringing over other individual American soloists to the UK, in 1966 Smith concocted an entire band of jazz veterans, the New Orleans All Stars. With the German promoter Horst Lippmann, he arranged a month’s European tour for Purnell, Alvin Alcorn, Darnell Howard, Jimmy Archey, Pops Foster and Cie Frazier, all of them legendary names in jazz history.
Although this was received with somewhat lukewarm enthusiasm in Britain, then still in the grip of the feud between followers of modern jazz and “trad” enthusiasts, it was wildly successful in Europe, and after the Swiss leg of the tour, Smith resolved to travel back to the United States with the band and seek his fortune there.
He settled for a time in New Orleans, where in addition to playing and recording with many of his idols, he set up a British fish-and-chip shop. Unfortunately those in the complex web of local protection rackets were not impressed by his success, and he ended up leaving town in a hurry, although he used the opportunity to travel widely in North America, getting to know such jazz pioneers as the trumpeter Henry Red Allen.
He played in and around New York with other elder statesmen of the music, including Tony Parenti and the drummer Zutty Singleton.
On his return to Europe, Smith resumed the leadership of his Climax Band, playing regularly at the Madingley Club near Richmond in Surrey.
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Then wanderlust overtook him again, and he moved to Denmark, joining Papa Bue’s Viking Jazz Band, with whom he played until 1974, as well as launching his Rarities record label. A problem with his diaphragm led him to return to Britain, but after treatment, he resumed playing, settling in the West Country and co-leading the band Hefty Jazz with Chris Barber’s former clarinettist Ian Wheeler. In due course Smith took over the band as sole leader.
1981 saw the first of his lavish concert package presentations, when he reassembled the personnel of Louis Armstrong’s All Stars, and flanked by clarinettist Peanuts Hucko and trombonist Big Chief Russell Moore, he did a more than passable job of recreating Satchmo’s trumpet-playing for “The Wonderful World of Louis Armstrong”, which toured several times in Britain and Europe. This was followed by a show called “100 Years of Dixieland” starring George Chisholm, and then by his tributes to the great American songwriters. Although he hired several distinguished singers to front these shows, on a good night his own playing was well up to their level, the Times critic singling out his “show-stopping routine with a wine-glass mute” in one of Elaine Delmar’s Gershwin concerts at the Queen Elizabeth Hall.
Smith said at the time, “I want to get people back into concert halls to hear jazz once again, and if we have to go a bit over the top with the packaging, so be it.”
Latterly Smith did not lead a regular band, although he put together ad hoc groups from a pool of musicians with whom he had worked in the past. He appeared as a soloist at various festivals in Europe, playing his distinctive brand of Armstrong-influenced jazz, but health problems and a fondness for alcohol made it increasingly difficult to perform to his own highest standards.
He had been married three times, but was living alone at the time of his death, working on a colourful autobiography about his years as a musician.
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Keith Smith, jazz trumpeter and bandleader, died on January 4, 2008, aged 65. He was born on March 19, 1940