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Legends -- Johnny Smith/George Van Eps


Larry Kart

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My curiosity about Van Eps led me to this CD, which he shares with Johnny Smith (on acoustic guitar), both men playing solo. The Smith tracks, which date from 1976 and that according to one Amazon commentator Smith didn't want released, are stunning IMO -- vividly (or, if you prefer) closely recorded, they have quite a zest or elan to them. A good many of Smith's tracks are embellished versions of classical guitar staples, but I find them gripping nonetheless, and his version of 'Round Midnight" (below) is quite something. The Van Eps tracks are what one might expect, but from him I expect and get something akin to magic.
https://www.amazon.com/Legends-Johnny-Smith-George-Van/dp/B0000006NE/ref=sr_1_3?s=music&ie=UTF8&qid=1539707693&sr=1-3&keywords=legends+johnny+smith

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Maybe it's a pity that Smith got categorized as a"jazz" guitarist? Casualty of the times, perhaps. But I can be totally engrossed in that clip without once thinking "jazz".

otoh, I've yet to hear a Chet Atkins record where I don't think "country". But I don't really enjoy listening to Chet Atkins that much.

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42 minutes ago, JSngry said:

Maybe it's a pity that Smith got categorized as a"jazz" guitarist? Casualty of the times, perhaps. But I can be totally engrossed in that clip without once thinking "jazz".

Maybe Smith is jazz in conception, but not jazz in execution.  It's hard for me to believe he could improvise using those block chords.

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Well, I'd not put anything beyond anybody if they practice enough, but I find myself enjoying him as a "set piece" guy than as a "jazz guitarist". That's the big reason I passed on his Mosaic, I didn't want that much of that. But now I'm developing a limp and got this damn dog I can't get rid of, so maybe that was not a good choice?

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Smith did make some jazz records IMO, but he's basically just (if "just" is the right word) a guitarist, which is OK by me. However, while I'd have to go to performances by other classical guitarists to be sure, my first impression was that on familiar pieces like Albienz's "Sevilla" his approach is a bit different than others' -- more of a sense of "attack" perhaps, which for me runs a bit counter to Jim's' 'he's a"set piece" guy.' Yes, the pieces are that, but they don't sound quite like "set pieces" in his hands; there's more immediacy.

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Smith's amazing accomplishment on those recordings was being able to perform those classical guitar staples entirely with a plectrum, rather than the standard finger style practice.

They came out too late for me to loan the CD to my classical guitar teacher in graduate school, to get his opinion of Smith's heretical use of a pick on those pieces. The last time he had anything to say about a jazz guitarist was when a hapless student loaned him some of Joe Pass' 'Virtuoso' albums. He let loose a string of epithets, which had me shaking in my shoes, 

Ironically, I chose a Van Eps piece for my final jury, and the guy loved it, and made me xerox a copy of it for his own use.

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To get a good understanding of who exactly Smith was, I'd recommend reading his biography "Moonlight In Vermont", written by a British guitarist a few years ago.

The difference in Smith's approach to jazz was his very different approach to rhythm in his single line solos.You don;t really notice it until you hear his recordings with his old buddy from the NBC Studio Orchestra, Hank Jones. Smith invariably takes the first solo on most songs, and everything seems fine, until Jones comes in for his solo.

All of a sudden, it sounds like you're listening to a completely different style of music. The eighth notes become the tied triplets that all boppers used, instead of the almost classically even eighth notes that Smith was playing. and the syncopation boppers achieved by accenting the offbeats of said eighth notes appears, instead of Smith's accenting eighth notes on the beat. \

The 'troublemaker' Jones finishes his solo, and we're returned to Smith's world of even, unaccented eighth note lines that sound as if they were written out beforehand.

On most of Smith's Roost recordings of the 50s, he uses the pianist Bob Pancoast, who sounds like a pianistic version of Smith, so we don't notice the difference in Smith's rhythmic

conception as much as we did when Jones was playing with him on some of the Verve recordings of the 60s.

When a writer informed Smith that he wanted to put out a book of transcriptions of Smith's single line solos, Smith's reaction was reportedly, "Why the heck would you want to do a book of my solos? Why don't you do a book of Jimmy Raney's solos? His lines were much hipper than mine." 

One of Raney's students claimed that Smith used to sit incognito in the back of clubs when Raney was playing in NY to figure out how Raney 'did it'. That would have to be verified by Jon Raney.

The other side of Smith was his literally perfect technique, incredible beauty of sound, and astonishing solo guitar performances, all of which pretty much establish him as probably the greatest plectrum guitarist that ever lived.

Van Eps switched to finger style playing from his early days of plectrum playing, and developed what he called his 'lap style' of playing the guitar, taking advantage of the contrapuntal aspects of the guitar, in addition to a very advanced sense of harmony. He added a seventh string to his guitar to give a fuller, almost pianistic range to his guitar playing. Smith accomplished this on a smaller level by tuning his lowest string down a whole step, from E to D.

In addition to playing his great solo arrangements of standards, Van Eps was also an accomplished composer of solo guitar pieces.

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Fascinating posts on Smith, sgcim. That you think he was "probably the greatest plectrum guitarist that ever lived" is good enough for me. And as you say, it was not just a matter of technique but also of beauty of sound.

BTW,  here's the story of Smith playing the guitar part in the Schoenberg Serenade:|

It wasn't planned for me to play the guitar part and I wouldn't do it again for anything. What happened to me with this piece was this. They'd been working on it for a long time -- several months, because it was going to be performed in honor of Schoenberg's 75th birthday with the composer there; but this was just before he died, and he was very sick so he wasn't there. They had this classic guitarist and he couldn't get it together. Schoenberg had written the piece in actual pitch -- in bass and treble clef where it sounds, so they'd even taken the parts out and transposed them an octave higher into the guitar's register. 

But I guess the poor classic guitarist's problem was that he just couldn't follow direction. So on a Friday afternoon I was leaving NBC and waiting at the elevator and these guys came up to me and said they'd like to talk to me. One of them was a violinist with the NBC Symphony Orchestra, and they told me that Mitropoulos was thinking of scrubbing it. This would be a disaster because this was Friday and the performance was on the following Wednesday; and they had composers who had come from all over the world for the occasion. So, they said, was it possible for me to try to do this piece, and they handed me this thing. I looked at it and I wanted to say that there was just no way. But they said if you're not willing to at least try it they're going to throw it out. So I said when is our first rehearsal, how long do I have to look at this music? They said that Monday morning would be the first rehearsal.
 
Well, I'm an idiot and I say OK. So this was Friday, and as usual I didn't have to work Saturday; I went out and made the rounds and really got myself good and juiced up and got to bed about 5 o'clock. At 6 o'clock the phone rang and a guy says the maestro insists on having a rehearsal at 7 o'clock. I couldn't believe it! I hadn't even looked at the music - I'd hidden it under the bed. He says 'I understand that, but the maestro insists and you've got to come up.' So I go up there to his suite and, Oh, my gosh, I felt terrible. I was just hung over; had the shakes -- the whole thing. So, boy, I get my box of mistakes out and put the music up there. He gives a down beat, and naturally I couldn't find the neck of the guitar; but when he gave a down beat if I saw that there was something there well I'd hit it. And I guess that impressed him enough in at least one respect: that I could follow direction. So we shambled a bit on this thing and he gave the OK nod and everybody was real happy.
 
Now, at that time I was working with a man at NBC by the name of Irwin Kostel who had been pianist with my trio and later became chief arranger with Sid Cesar. He was one of the finest musicians I'd ever known. He [would score] all the music for West Side Story, The Sound of Music, all these things, and he'd win all these Academy Awards for his orchestrations. Anyway Irwin and I were real good buddies, so I went out to his house and we spent the whole weekend, day and night -- bless his heart -- sitting at the piano and guitar going through this music. We rehearsed Monday, and Tuesday, and Wednesday night we performed the work in the theatre in the Museum of Modern Art, and it went perfect. Dimitri Mitropoulos was such a warm, beautiful genius that there was no way you could make a mistake; he just gave you that confidence. And they received that piece so well that we encored the whole 7 movements. As with the recording, which we did later, I used my Epiphone Emperor without an amp, and I really had to pound to try to get this thing heard. And it's not really all that loud on the recording. Incidentally, that Epiphone was stolen during a break at NBC and I never saw it again.

 

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