Hollie Smith - soul sister

Hollie Smith

It's easy to fall in love with Hollie Smith. Brazilian pianist Amilton Godoy, a delightful elderly gentleman with smoke-tinted white hair and a joyous smile, has certainly done so, as have the rest of his jazz band, Zimbo Trio.

"She is, how you say it? ... like a mermaid," says bass player Itamar Callaco.

He's right. When the 23-year-old's long, slightly unkempt hair hangs down, rather than bundled on top of her head, she does look like a mermaid. A mermaid with tattoos.

Smith's boyfriend, Barnaby Weir from the Black Seeds and Fly My Pretties, needn't worry about Zimbo's infatuation. They are all perfect gentlemen. It's just that they've fallen in love with her voice and a song she wrote called Sampa Soul.

They have been rehearsing it with her over the last few days in Sao Paulo, Brazil, and today they're at Zabumba studios - a clean-cut, old school recording joint - putting the song to tape.

Smith is in Brazil with a bunch of other New Zealand musicians, including Weir; P-Digsss from Shapeshifter; producer, DJ and instrumentalist Recloose; Wellington musician and producer Maaka McGregor; and Wellington-based Brazilian singer Alda Rezende.

They are all there for a project called Bacardi B-Live OE: Brazil, which takes some of this country's top musicians overseas for a musical and cultural collaboration. Organisers say they chose Brazil because "they're just as passionate about their music as we are".

The New Zealanders are spending three weeks in Sao Paulo to record songs with 60 Brazilian musicians for an album expected to come out in October on Loop Recordings.

Smith and Zimbo have done six takes of Sampa Soul today and she's happy with the result, apart from one bit where her voice went a little wonky and needs to be "muted".

Godoy is beaming. Through an interpreter he says: "It's easy to see why Hollie is such a success in New Zealand because when the lyrics were translated for me I knew she didn't lack in depth, which is amazing considering her age. She has a natural and blossoming musicality."

Like Zimbo, much of New Zealand has fallen in love with Hollie Smith. Hers is the voice of 2006, thanks mainly to the song Bathe In the River from the No. 2 movie soundtrack. It's been in the charts for 20 weeks - most of that time in the top 10 - making it the biggest local song of the year, and has meant her self-titled debut EP from 2005 has also started selling well.

After the recording session, back at Kiwi Casa - a two-storey villa in the middle of the posh Jardins suburb, where the musicians are staying - Smith says her debut album will probably be out early next year.

"It's daunting because I feel like there's a bit of pressure to produce a good album [after the success of Bathe...]

"I think I'm capable of doing it but I'm really aware of the potential for it to do really well - or not. But I just want to get it right."

Meanwhile, Smith is also part of the Fly My Pretties collective who will play a sellout show at the Auckland Town Hall on Saturday night.

She is adamant that while Bathe is a great track it's not her song and, as is the case for many young artists, the EP was just a bunch of songs she had to get out of her system. "They were songs I'd written when I was 15 or 16. They've always stuck with me and I just needed to vent them."

Smith has been making music for 10 years but it's only in the past six months that she's been making a living from it. "The No. 2 thing raised my profile, a few more jobs came my way and people think to pick up the EP now. So I can live off music and concentrate on doing it properly."

Smith has always been a singer. As a child she taped herself singing songs about her toy, a Pound Puppy.

"I used to make up songs and sing around the house quite loudly - and obnoxiously, actually."

She's still pretty loud nowadays - watching the football World Cup she lets rip with words that can't be repeated here.

In the recording studio she is relaxed, but firm about the sound she wants, yet is rather reserved much of the time. The day of the recording session with Zimbo she is nervous and not as confident as she appears when belting out her songs on stage.

Smith comes from a musical family - her father is a guitarist, and her stepdad is a well-known Celtic musician. She sang in school choirs, and at 11 was writing her own songs and performing them in front of the school: "Doing that was no problem because I enjoyed it."

While at Northcote College in Auckland she joined the school's big band, one of the best of its kind in New Zealand. At 16 she recorded a Celtic album with her stepdad.

"I never had music lessons as a kid so I didn't have that orientation about music - I listened to it, I liked it, and I sang along to records and I would imitate the guitar. When I did pick up the guitar the first thing I started doing was learning songs from the radio.

"I could never understand the theory of music writing. My ear-training was just that much more advanced than sitting down and learning a piece of music."

Smith says she fell into a bad routine after leaving school. She was working in the hospitality industry and went "a bit wayward" and her music suffered.

But in 2003 Smith moved to Wellington. Soon after she hooked up with TrinityRoots, sang on their album, Home Land and Sea, and toured nationally with the band.

"Mentally and musically," she says, "it was probably the best thing I have ever done because they reconnected me to music."

And she's been on the rise ever since.

Travelling to Brazil has been overwhelming for Smith. Not only has there been the pressure of recording two new songs with musicians she had not met, there were language and cultural differences.

"The music is almost secondary to the experience ... but the music's still going fantastically well," she says. "I haven't travelled much, but this is definitely a place I'd love to come back to and spend some proper time. The energy of the place is quite unique."

For example, on Saturday night a group of us go out to Gloria, a classic - very cheesy - Brazilian club in the Italian area of Bixiga, where Recloose has hooked up a DJ set for the night.

It's far from the vibe of a New Zealand club. The punters are checking out themselves - and each other - in the many mirrors lining the walls. The comings and goings from the toilets - boys and girls, groups of boys, groups of girls - are intriguing.

Smith thinks it's a great joke how she was dancing with Chico, our Brazilian guide, when his former girlfriend burst in. Two of her friends placed themselves strategically between her and their friend's man. Ah yes, Brazil is a passionate place.

"Sao Paulo's like one of those places where it's chaotic and hectic but there is a method to the madness - like the roads and the driving. It's crazy but it all makes sense," Smith says.

"There's just so many people - 19 million, the third biggest [city] in the world - it's pretty hard out. It's so alive.

"It does humble you, too, and make you feel lucky about where we live. This is a Third World country and when you're going through the favelas [slums] and there's miles of cardboard boxes and shacks where people live, it inspires you to not take things for granted.

"The music's similar for me," she says about how the trip has reaffirmed her love of music. "A lot of the stuff I've done with Zimbo Trio has been through a translator so it's always a little bit chaotic, but look at what we've achieved through the song.

"Like every musician says, music is an international language and once you start playing, the barriers break down and there's a lot of freedom there to talk to each other through song. I think Zimbo and I have got a really good relationship considering we can't talk to each other."

Godoy agrees: "Today you saw the Zimbo Trio not as a trio, but as a quartet. That is the nature of music - to share the joy."

Zimbo have been playing together since the early 1960s - the original bass player was replaced by Callaco five years ago - and have released more than 50 albums. They are fantastic players and Smith knows it.

"It's really humbling playing with them," she says, "but it's also quite flattering because I feel as though I can keep up and step up to the challenge of playing with such amazing musicians."

She wrote Sampa Soul before leaving New Zealand and Zimbo put a Brazilian spin on it. The result is a samba-meets-soul jazz track.

Smith also recorded a song, called Bela Luz, with Brazilian producer Apollo 9. "The song with Zimbo, the first line goes, 'I'll sell my soul for a dollar because it's slowing me down', because sometimes it doesn't get you that far.

"You can be really open-minded and a loving, beautiful person but sometimes it doesn't make a difference because the world can be so ruthless.

"My songs generally aren't about superficial needs, or wants, and they run a little deeper. I don't write love songs. There's a certain narrowmindedness in some human beings that I despise and that's a lot of what I talk about. And although I'm guilty of being as narrowminded and stubborn as anyone, the songs I write are about how I aspire to be and how I hope to one day live."

Smith is keen to emphasise that she is a songwriter and musician as well as a singer. "Being a vocalist for so long, some people don't really expect me to have much more than that. I think I've got a bit of a complex about it and I want people to know that I write my music and arrange it, even though I can't read or write music."

In recent years she's had to treat her vocal cords with more care. "Two years ago I could drink and smoke for hours before going on stage and I'd be fine, but then I realised I couldn't take it for granted any more.

"I would much prefer to never drink again and be able to sing whenever I want to and do it fantastically as opposed to the other way round."

That's just as well, because it's her special and powerful voice that people know Hollie Smith for - at least until her first album next year shows that there's much more to her than that.

LOWDOWN

Who: Hollie Smith

What: Wellington-based singer, musician and songwriter

Playing: With Fly My Pretties, Auckland Town Hall, Saturday; Wellington Opera House, Sunday.

Music: Hollie Smith EP (2005); Fly My Pretties - The Return of Fly My Pretties (2005); Bathe In the River (2006) available on single and No. 2 soundtrack.