Jazz veterans at peak of their powers

Steve Smith was voted best all-round drummer five years in a row.

Jazz being an art form best practised live means those who are its most interesting and innovative artists have long performance careers. It is the music in which the older you are, the better you get.

This year's international jazz festival features international artists - and locals such as concert organiser, trombonist and band leader Rodger Fox - who have decades of live experience behind them.

American drummer Steve Smith was a man out of time in many ways. As a teenager in the 60s, when Beatlemania was sweeping the world, he was studying the styles of big band leaders Gene Krupa, Buddy Rich and Louie Bellson.

He performed in amateur pop bands but also gained performing experience in a professional concert band and with his college's big band.

In the early 70s he attended Berklee College of Music in Boston, where his influences included the likes of Tony Williams, Billy Cobham and Lenny White.

At 19 he began his fulltime professional career playing in a touring big band and working with bebop player Buddy DeFranco, and by the end of the decade he had expanded his horizons by playing jazz-rock fusion with violinist Jean-Luc Ponty.

He slipped sideways into rock when he joined Journey, then one of the biggest stadium rock bands.

It made him rich and famous, but at heart he was still a jazz lover, and after a series of world tours and albums he left in 1985 and became an in-demand session musician.

Over the past 15 years, Smith has played on hits by Mariah Carey, Bryan Adams, Italian singer Zucchero, and Australian pop-rockers Savage Garden.

Even during his Journey days, however, he had his own side-project, Vital Information, and that is still a working band.

His distinctive style and meticulous timekeeping saw him acclaimed by Modern Drummer magazine readers as the best all-round drummer five years in a row. Vital Information's 97 album Where We Come From was voted best contemporary jazz recording of 1998 by the Association for Independent Music.

Smith still has regular touring and recording commitments and has played with Steps Ahead (which includes saxophonist Michael Brecker and guitarist Mike Stern), as well as with pianist Ahmad Jamal, bassist Stanley Clarke, tabla player Zakir Hussain and the Buddy Rich Big Band.

In 2001 Modern Drummer named him one of the top 25 drummers of all time and the following year he was voted into the Modern Drummer Hall of Fame.

The other artists on the festival bill are equally impressive.

Baritone saxophonist Mike Brignola is a member of the famed Woody Herman Big Band, and trombonist Bruce Paulson - who has played in New Zealand previously - has been a member of the Buddy Rich Big Band and was in America's famed Tonight Show band for 20 years.

He has also spent a large part of his career as a studio and session musician, recording for Nelson Riddle, Frank Sinatra, Stevie Wonder, Dianne Reeves and Natalie Cole. He was an original member of the Toshiko Akiyoshi Big Band.

These three seasoned musicians will join singer Glenn Walters and Rodger Fox's All-Star Band in the next few weeks for concerts and workshops around the country, starting with an Auckland Town Hall concert tomorrow night.

Performance

*What: 2005 Blue Chip New Zealand International Jazz Series

*Where and when: Auckland Town Hall, tomorrow; Holy Trinity Church, Tauranga, Fri; TSB Showplace, New Plymouth, Sat; Westpac Trust Theatre, Hamilton, Sun