Paul Smoker Trio

Paul Smoker, trumpet
Ken Filiano, bass
Phil Haynes, drums

November 16, 2005
8:30 p.m.
Bucknell Hall - Free

For over twenty years Paul Smoker taught trumpet, jazz, and 20th-century music at the universities of Iowa, Northern Iowa, and Wisconsin-Oshkosh, and at Coe College. During his tenure at Coe, he founded the Paul Smoker Trio with Ron Rohovit and Phil Haynes, and they began to receive international attention, recording and playing jazz festivals in the U.S., Canada, and Europe. Since then he has made more than forty recordings as a leader of his own groups as well as with Anthony Braxton, Joint Venture, Vinny Golia, Lou Grassi, David Taylor,Herb Robertson,Adam Lane, Burton Greene, and others. He has also worked with Art Pepper, Frank Rosolino, David Liebman, Don Byron, John Tchicai, Barry Altschul, Gerry Hemingway, Ellery Eskelin, Drew Gress, Mark Dresser, and many more respected musicians.

The six commercial recordings by The Paul Smoker Trio became the benchmark for new jazz conception and performance. Paul Smoker’s work with his trio and other ensembles in the 1980s and 1990s places him in the company of Kenny Wheeler and Herb Robertson as the three most important jazz trumpet innovators of the last 30 years.

Trumpeter, composer, and educator Paul Smoker studied and performed both jazz and classical music while growing up in Davenport, Iowa.He attended the University of Iowa, eventually receiving a Doctor of Musical Arts in trumpet. One of his fellow students there was David Sanborn.While in high school and college, he played in the clubs across the Mississippi River in Rock Island and Moline, as well as in Iowa City and Cedar Rapids, and got to work with Dodo Marmarosa, J. R.Monterose, and Al Jarreau, among others.He was also a member of the Iowa Brass Quintet, touring throughout the United States, and the University of Iowa Center for New Music.

Paul currently directs the jazz studies program at Nazareth College in Rochester, New York, and is composer-in-residence at Rochester’s School of the Arts. His quartet, with guitarist Steve Salerno, bassist Ed Schuller, and drummer Phil Haynes, performed at the Rochester International Jazz Festival this past June. The quartet’s recent recording is entitled The Paul Smoker Notet Live at the Bop Shop.

Ken Filiano performs throughout the world, playing and recording with leading artists in jazz, spontaneous improvisation, classical, world/ethnic, and interdisciplinary performance, fusing the rich traditions of the double bass with his singular powers of invention. Ken’s solo bass CD, Subvenire (Nine Winds), received unanimous critical praise. For this and numerous other recordings, critics have called Ken a “creative virtuoso,” a “master of technique,”and “a paradigm of that type of artist … who can play anything in any context and make it work, simply because he puts the music first and leaves peripheral considerations behind.”

Ken Filiano’s collaborations with numerous artists, including Vinny Golia, Steve Adams, Richard Grossman, and Dom Minasi, have brought wide acclaim. Ken has also played and/or recorded with artists and orchestras including Bobby Bradford, Nels Cline, Alex Cline, Ted Dunbar, Giora Feidman, the Georgian Chamber Orchestra, Lou Grassi, Phil Haynes, Ursel Schlicht, and Steve Swell; Fred Hess, Joseph Jarman; Sheila Jordan & the Aardvark Orchestra; Joe Labarbera, Joelle Leandre, Frank London, the Manhattan Chamber Orchestra, Tina Marsh, Warne Marsh, Barre Phillips, Don Preston, Bob Rodriguez, Roswell Rudd, the ROVA Saxophone Quartet, Paul Smoker, Andrea Wolper, and Pablo Ziegler.

Phil Haynes first engaged Paul Smoker and Ron Rohovit for his sophomore jazz recital at Coe College in 1980.With this concert, the three musicians inaugurated SRH, a decade long association, later known as the Paul Smoker Trio. Their debut album, QB, featured Anthony Braxton and was named the Number One Jazz Album of 1985 in Coda Magazine by critic Kevin Whitehead. After graduating from Coe in 1983, Haynes moved to New York City. Since that time he has been featured on some 42 releases by American and European record companies. Critics have compared his drumming to the masters Jack DeJohnette, Roy Haynes, and Elvin Jones, and his compositions to Ives, Mingus, and the Art Ensemble of Chicago.

 Haynes has ten recordings as a leader, including Continuum with violinist Mark Feldman, the innovative quintet Four Horns & What?, A Couch in Brooklyn with pianist Micu Narinsky, The Hammond Insurgency with organist Jeff Palmer, Free Country with cellist Hank Roberts, and the new solo percussion recording Sanctuary.

Phil Haynes’ varied professional associations also include Tim Berne, Anthony Braxton, Don Byron, Marilyn Crispell, Joe Daley, Mark Dresser, Marty Ehrlich, Ken Filiano, Charles Gayle, Vinny Golia, Mark Helias, Lindsay Horner, Ingrid Jensen, Frank Lacy, David Liebman, Michele Rosewoman, Ed Schuller, Louis Sclavis, John Tchicai, Gebhard Ullmann and Tom Varner.