Born in Edinburgh in 1967, Tommy Smith won best soloist and best group
titles at Edinburgh International Jazz Festival, aged 14, and recorded his
first album at 15. After studying at Berklee College of Music he joined Gary
Burton’s group, touring worldwide and recording the Whiz Kids album on ECM
Records. He signed to Blue Note Records in 1989 and having formed his own
record company, Spartacus, has now released twenty-four solo albums. He has
presented television and radio programmes for the BBC and Channel Four
and has received awards and honours including a BBC Heart of Jazz award,
Best Woodwind at the inaugural Scottish Jazz Awards (2008), the Scottish Jazz
Expo Award (2009), and honorary doctorates from Heriot-Watt and Glasgow
Caledonian universities. His many compositions include four saxophone
concertos, the symphonic work Edinburgh for Edinburgh Youth Orchestra, The
Morning of the Imminent for Dame Cleo Laine and Sir John Dankworth, the
Glasgow Jazz Festival commission Beasts of Scotland, and a series of large scale
works, including Planet Wave, Beauty and the Beast, Torah and the world’s first
meeting between jazz and Japanese taiko drumming, The World of the Gods,
for the Scottish National Jazz Orchestra, which he had directed since 1995. In
June 2010 he was awarded a professorship by the Royal Scottish Academy of
Music and Drama, where he is artisic director of jazz.
