BRATTLEBORO-We at the Vermont Jazz Center are thrilled to welcome drummer Nate Smith to our Brattleboro venue on Saturday, Feb. 21. Smith is known for his work with the Fearless Flyers, Dave Holland, Brittany Howard, Jon Batiste, and many others.
Smith is the recent recipient of two Grammy awards for his latest release as a leader, Live-Action . This concert kicks off a tour that he is leading with his current trio, including pianist/keyboardist Jacob Pollack (“J3PO”) and electric bassist “Carrtoons” (Ben Carr).
Smith is considered a “deep pocket” drummer, one who thrives on creating a unified groove with his bandmates. When an ensemble is “in the pocket,” each instrument locks into its own part and considers the overall group sound paramount.
In the drummer-focused podcast Go with Elmo Lovano, Smith described what “pocket” means to him.
“Pocket to me is about the space in which all of the musicians on stage agree on time. […] When a band plays ‘in the pocket,’ they are all playing in the same space — they all agree on the distance between the notes. They all agree on the length of notes, the emphasis. [...] Pocket always involves playing with other musicians.”
The characteristics of Smith’s sound are solid time, a commitment to the natural build of an arrangement: funky when needed, not overly busy, and always responsive to the moment.
“I think that space is very valuable in music — I’m not a chops drummer, I love watching drummers who play with lots of chops (there are a lot of killin’ drummers out there),” he has said. “But my approach is to determine how to best utilize space, how to make the best use of dynamics, and how to develop rhythmic ideas in ways that are interesting.”
Over the years, Nate Smith has collaborated and toured with renowned artists, which, in addition to Howard, Batiste, and the Fearless Flyers, include Pat Metheny, Ravi Coltrane, Childish Gambino, Norah Jones, Vulfpeck, Chris Potter, Kiefer, Carrtoons, Charlie Hunter, and Kurt Elling. He has graced the cover of Modern Drummer magazine and provided the backbeat for Late Night with Seth Meyers’ house band.
Smith’s first experience with jazz royalty occurred when he was in his late teens in the mid-1990s. The legendary Betty Carter heard Smith’s college ensemble at the now-defunct International Association of Jazz Educators convention in New York City.
After a while, Carter invited Smith to be the drummer in her renowned Jazz Ahead youth discovery program. That tenure led to Smith playing under her direction in the program for two years. Later he became an instructor after Carter had passed away.
During his college and graduate school years, Smith pursued many other projects, including creating beats and serving as a producer for other artists’ musical projects.
Smith is a co-writer and co-producer of a song recorded by Michael Jackson, “Heaven Can Wait.” In the early 2000s, Smith began an eight-year tenure with the world-renowned jazz bassist Dave Holland (who played and recorded with Miles Davis).
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Smith’s doorway to the drums began when, as a kid, he fell in love with the music on his father’s vinyl record collection. Smith has stated “In my youth I pulled from the drummers I heard on my dad’s vinyls — like Steve Gadd with Bob James, Omar Hakim with Weather Report, Stewart Copeland with the Police, and Harvey Mason with Herbie Hancock. I would mimic their sounds and learn their beats.”
In an interview with the StickPeople’s On the Corner podcast, Smith also highlighted the influence that James Brown’s drummer, Clyde Stubblefield, had on him, especially the tune “Funky Drummer” which contains a legendary drumbreak that informs Smith’s basic style and concept.
During his interview with World Cafe, Smith said that “while listening to him [Stubblefield] I discovered a whole new solar system that changed the way that I play, that’s for sure.”
Even today, Smith keeps reaching back to those moments in his youth and identifies them as reoccurring sources of inspiration. He claims: “I try to re-create the excitement of the discovery of that moment — it’s that sense of discovery that I try to convey on stage — it’s an ongoing process.”
Smith’s signature “bounce” can be heard even on tunes with complicated time feels. He explained: “I’m also interested in playing odd meter grooves in ways that feel natural and don’t feel odd; I go for grooves that are danceable.”
He told Jazz Café, “My relationship with straight ahead jazz began later with Art Blakey — that was the first drummer I discovered who was definitely a jazz drummer, but he was so funky, his backbeat was so big, and his sound was so big, that I fell in love with it.”
One of the reasons why Smith is currently so visible in the public eye is that he embraced social media early on to stay connected with his fans. His undergraduate degree is in media arts and design with an emphasis in recording and production.
In a conversation with Norah Jones, on her Norah Jones Is Playing Along podcast, the two musicians discussed how a current challenge for up-and-coming artists in the digital age is that the marketing of their own music is often their own responsibility, rather than that of a record label.
Nate Smith is a smart strategist who intentionally applies the tools he has learned toward the goals of developing his own future and carefully cultivating his image.
For example, after noticing that his drum videos were, as he says, “catching a lot of eyeballs,” he then produced two albums, Pocket Change (volumes 1 and 2), of unaccompanied drum solos. Smith then started to beef up his own YouTube channel and hired a stylist.
He now has more than 83,000 followers on YouTube, and a legion of other drummers who post their own videos attempting to dissect Smith’s trickiest beats. Some of the most popular beats have onomatopoetic hits names like “Rambo” and “Skip Step.”
His latest album, the twice-Grammy-nominated LiveAction, is a snapshot of the more mature (age 50) Nate Smith. The music has a retro cover illustrating the bevy of keyboards and drums that he plays. Many of the sounds and grooves he conjures embrace the analog music of the 1970s and were inspired by his father’s record collection.
The disc even includes a revised version of the Pointer Sisters’ “Automatic” interpreted by vocalist Lalah Hathaway. The driving force of the album is Smith’s funky drumming, but the writing and arranging is also brilliant in the way it transcends genres and yet makes a unified statement.
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It is a rare and powerful experience to get to hear Nate Smith perform as a leader in the New England region. Come find out why Giovanni Russonello of The New York Times claims that Nate Smith’s drumming “is a marvel unto itself [...]. Broad of palette, it has the rare ability to dial up the complexity and the sensitivity at the same time.”
VJC operates using a subsidized ticket system that lowers the base cost per ticket to $25 even though the value per seat is more than double that amount. Additional donations are welcome.
Tickets can be reserved online at vtjazz.org, or by phone 802-254-9088, ext. 1. Arrangements for mobility access are available by emailing or calling to schedule a time for one of our staff to meet your party.
Eugene Uman is director of the Vermont Jazz Center. The Commons’ Deeper Dive column gives artists, arts organizations, and other nonprofits elbow room to write in first person and be unabashedly opinionated, passionate, and analytical about their own creative work and events.
This Arts column was submitted to The Commons.