a conversation in nine questions with Martin Smith
I have rarely, though admittedly once or twice, seen Martin Smith without his trumpet. Last week we met to discuss arts education, collaborative approaches to music and the local jazz scene.
So I guess the sensible place for us to start really is if you could sort of talk a little bit about how you got into music,
I was about 17 a couple of guys came to my school - a guy called Digby Fairweather, a brilliant and quite famous jazz player from London.
He was an incredibly charismatic and eccentric character, I mean, if you met him you'd know that he couldn't be called anything else.
So he and a piano player came into my school doing improvisation workshops around blues workshops. And then they played… Stan played great stride piano and Digby plays the cornet but he plays very eccentrically, he plays right out the corner of his mouth, so even to look at - it's like nothing you've seen.
When they started to play? Every, every hair on my body just went, just, that just changed my life, from that moment on it was a case of I want to make people feel how they just made me feel, you know?
I came into the city for music college and when I was about 19. I went to a community college, a technical college, with several branches that taught cookery to knitting to you name it.
They had a performing arts department, so I did that. It was bare bones but they had some amazing teachers and I've been here in Liverpool ever since.
It’s interesting that you went to a college that wasn’t music specialist?
Not at all.
They had a thing called a diploma in light music, which is like in terms of a qualification worth absolute zilch, but for several generations of musicians in Liverpool, that place was an absolute oasis.
It had zero money; the building was leaky, there was little in terms of equipment. It was an old school and there were no proper practice rooms, but there were some great teachers there.
It was an eclectic bunch I was there was mostly sort of guitarists - Liverpool has zillions and zillions of guitarists. I was lucky that in my year there was a bumper crop for horn players.
That college was was my first exposure to the kind of mentality that Scousers have, or that Liverpool engenders in people, in terms of a collaborative approach to music - to being together.
I've always found there's a lot more cross pollination goes on in Liverpool. It’s not you play this kind of music and we play that kind of music and never the twain shall meet - the twain meets all the time.
You mention that this kind of education shaped a whole generation, if not generations, of musicians in Liverpool - how did that translate into careers?
When I went there was just some inspired teachers that were able educate people who've never read music before - to take people who were just into playing the guitar in the bedroom and out getting them to read music, to feel that they could want to understand more about the mechanics of it, the theory of it, to experiment…
There were guys, 10, 15 years older than me, who came through that, became professional musicians. They wouldn’t have done it without that and for at least a decade or two decades after I left, it was doing the same thing.
There were some touring bands that went off to tour around Germany, but I mean, there was also a much stronger live scene. Especially the pub scene: you could go work with a band playing soul music, you could do that six, seven nights a week in and around the local area.
You could make a living just being in a pub band, you know, and many people did
And that's died away.
What do you think has died away? Is it the culture, the venues?
I mean it's just the demise of that industry, it's happened slowly but steadily. Pubs are shutting, but as to why that's happening I couldn't really say.
Well, I think part of it is the lack of alternatives too right? Like, I love the pub as much as the next person. And we've still got a fair few crackers in Liverpool, it’s not like we're devastatingly short but many go night after night without music and there’s few alternative spaces.
There's no, I don't know, a bookshop that stays open late and does gigs in a more laid back setting.
For a while there was Mello Mello, do you remember Mello Mello? It was a fantastic thing. I think they opened in 2007 and they lasted about eight or nine years and they were affiliated with the Kazimir.
People who owned property then who would lease it for a very cheap rent to groups of hippies just to look to take care of, and keep life in, the building.
And so the group got hold of the building and made it a sort of community sort of art space - a dance space, a recording studio, but it was also just a place where people went for a cup of tea and just hung out on their own and got bands together.
But what you were saying about lack of an alternative to a pub - it was that direction and possibly that's probably why it was so healthy.
People would just come and have a cup of tea, read a book, you could come on your own, you would just go there and know that you would see somebody, start talking about music and plotting stuff.
It was spectacular.
Beyond that, how do you feel that the scene has changed in the last decade or so?
One of the things I’ve loved most about playing in this city is that, though I’m a jazz musician first and foremost, I love playing in as many different things as possible - Liverpool has always fed that and it still does.
I can't think of any other city where I would be able to do what I do, at the level I do, where I can make a living. I have made a living playing little pub gigs and residencies, playing music I like, with people I like, and then get to go off and do sessions with interest in pop bands or anyone else.
I’ve spoken to a lot of people recently that see a real backbone of self-reliance in the city’s music scene that leads to incredible experimentation but worry that sometimes it can be limiting - in terms of connecting with people outside the city, especially those with the money. What do you think of that idea?
Absolutely and possibly a less of an interest in connecting to those people more more more just like fuck it we're doing art this is what we're doing and we're gonna do it anyway.
And what, who, or where, do you think the epicenters of ‘interesting stuff’ are today?
The most recent bunch that I've kind of fallen in love with is a band called Olvine.
It’s the same thing again, they've just got this fucking drive to do what they're doing and it's a mixed. It’s this is mixture of some hardcore scousers and some kind of and some incomers and it's just inclusive.
I've really been impressed by what they're doing and how they're and their whole ethos about putting it together.
They’ve got a thing where they do gigs in the round with Quarry, and I've never seen that or been a part of anything like that before and I did one with them a couple of weeks back and it was just gorgeous.
And then, finally, what about stuff that's been going forever then, that just keeps trucking along?
The grapes. That's coming up coming to 20 years. And there’s a band called the Merseysippi Jazzmen which have been going since 1949 and they have had a Monday night residency somewhere in south Liverpool near Sefton Part - the Aigburth Arms.
More information on some of his music projects can be found here. Martin himself can be found most Sundays playing at the Grapes (pictured above).
Get down on it:
26/04 – Tories Can’t Dance: Addley, RUINS, Rohan Young (Skiddle)
28/04 - Dancing for Mental Health: Sun Palace Soundsystem (Sober & afternoon event, RA)
28/04 - Grapes Jazz (music from 21:30)
On repeat this week:
All Yours Mate (Olvine, Live at Quarry)
Taxi Brousse (Rajery & Ballaké Sissoko)
Veranderd (Don Melody Club)
Seven (Grand Tapestry)
NB: apologies for the tardiness on just the second issue of this newsletter (start as you mean to go on) but let the record show that its not allllll that late for the author, at least, who has just crossed 8 times zones.
Back to regular scheduling next week - by which we mean Wednesday, or maybe Thursday, or whenever we feel like it…