Voice of Experience

You may have seen Jerome Smith, an avid supporter of jazz, frequenting venues where the music is known to rear its head. Occasionally, he would step up to the microphone to sing a tune or two.

Now, you can hear him, at age 79, in the comfort of your living room, on his debut CD. It’s called “The Rev,” and there’s no false advertisement or poetic license in the title. Smith is a retired minister who spent most of his pulpit tenure in St. Louis and elsewhere before heading home to Santa Barbara, where he was born in 1919.

Apart from its musical sheen, the recording is significant on at least two other fronts. It’s the first time Smith has put any concerted effort and intention into music since he was a trumpeter leading a trio in “honky-tonks and beer gardens” along State Street in the ‘30s.

This is also the first in a proposed series of recordings in the new “Artist of the Year” series of CDs, sponsored by the Santa Barbara Jazz Society, headed by president Stanley Naftaly. This Sunday at the DoubleTree (formerly the Red Lion), a Jazz Society concert, featuring sax player Dan St. Marseille and pianist Cecilia Coleman, will also include a musical appearance by Smith and the official ceremony presenting him with the “Artist of the Year” award.

It all began as an idea proposed by part-time Santa Barbaran Fred Karlin, the noted film composer and trumpeter who has been involved in the local jazz scene over the years. He knew of Smith’s musical proclivities from the preacher’s sit-ins with bassist Hank Allen’s gigs at the Red Lion. Smith remembered, “I had fun singing with them, because I didn’t play horn anymore. It was just a pastime, just recreational jam sessions. I always loved music--big band jazz and straight-ahead jazz music.”

Although Smith first scoffed at Karlin’s idea, he warmed up to it, and momentum and cooperation kept the project on course. Pianist Jim Argiro, who lived and played in Santa Barbara before moving to Massachusetts, worked up arrangements after establishing good keys for Smith over the telephone.

Karlin, and his wife, Meg, put together musicians eager to play, sans pay, and headed to Santa Barbara’s Beagle Studio. There, players from town, including Hank Allen, Peter Clark, Frank Frost, Tom Devaney and Karlin, were joined by such Los Angeles players of Karlin’s acquaintance as pianist Mike Melvoin and alto sax player Jeff Clayton.

The result is an album of unabashedly mainstream jazz, celebrating the song craft of yore. Performances by Smith and his cohorts are warm and unpretentious on such chestnuts as “Makin’ Whoopie,” “It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing)” and “You’ve Changed.” There is also a quirky blues tune penned by Clark, “Stanley, Meet McNally,” referring to Naftaly and John McNally, the artistic director of the Santa Barbara Jazz Festival.

Listening to the album, at times, we’re reminded of the good minister’s natural gift for oratory, as with the life-affirming spoken word preamble to “What a Wonderful World.”

“It was entirely spontaneous,” Smith said of the nonsectarian sermonette. “The first time we did that, we had that one chorus space in front, so I just started talking. I had to write it down so that if I do it again, it’ll be the same as on the CD. I had heard Louis Armstrong’s version, on which he talks in part of it. I got the idea to do it from what he said, but I didn’t quote him. It just came forth.

“We preachers like to talk. If you’ve been doing it 47 years, you get used to talking. You can do a lot of just on-your-feet thinking. You’ve gotta. That’s part of what you have to do, think on your feet. You improvise most of the time, if you’re really an effective preacher. If you get up there and read manuscripts, people get turned off.”

Looking back on his formative years in the ‘30s, Smith remembers Santa Barbara as a town buzzing with music along State Street. Elsewhere in town, big bands played dances at the Armory, and the likes of Cab Calloway and Duke Ellington would come for one-nighters at the “Fox” Arlington Theater.

Smith’s own introduction to jazz included the fare at the Elks’ Lodge on Carrillo Street.

“I used to get on a barrel, a 50-gallon drum, on the outside and peek in. That was the first time I saw Lionel Hampton, who had a little group that came up here. At that time, he was billed as ‘the world’s fastest drummer.’ He wasn’t playing vibes then.

“I must have been 11 or 12 years old. I was old enough to leave home and go up and down the streets after sunset. So the first time I saw him, he was drumming at that place, before Benny Goodman picked him up.”

Jazz in that seminal, pre-Swing era had a problematical relationship with the church.

“When I was a kid,” Smith said, “jazz was the devil’s music, so we had to draw a definitive line. It was the devil’s music simply because the music was played in honky-tonks, where they sold booze and the ‘moral and social sins’ of the world existed. Consequently, they equated jazz music with everything that went on in those honky-tonks.

“But then it came out of the honky-tonks and became refined. People took a different view of it. It’s just music. It’s communication. It’s a story and a feeling.”

Around 1940, Smith put away his trumpet and his musical aspirations. He enlisted in the Army during World War II, then settled into a long life in the church. That concluded, aptly enough, at his own home church, the St. Paul A.M.E. church in Santa Barbara, where he was the pastor for three years just before his retirement.

Could his new CD signal the beginning of a new career as a jazz singer?

“I’ll pursue it if the opportunity presents itself. But I’m 79 years old, and not in the best of health. I’m not going to drive myself to do anything. If it’s comfortable and I feel good about it, sure.

“It’s a totally new experience. Sometimes I pinch myself and say ‘I don’t believe this.’ I never dreamed of this, and never pursued it, so to speak. It more or less fell into my lap.”

BE THERE

Jerome Smith, with the Dan St. Marseille Quintet, Sunday from 6-9 p.m. at Fess Parker’s DoubleTree Resort, 633 E. Cabrillo Blvd., Santa Barbara. $15 requested donation, includes dessert and coffee buffet. Resort (805) 564-4333. Jazz Society (805) 682-7441.