Larry Smith died the weekend before last. He did it rather quietly, which really didn’t suit him at all.
Smith played jazz recordings all night at WBEZ, “back in the day,” when Chicago’s public radio station programmed jazz in the evening hours. For the last several years of my own 17-year run at the station, Larry followed me on the air: I’d play my last tune, the hour-hand would hit 1 AM, and Larry and I would exchange a few pleasantries before I punched “play” for the first tune of his shift.
Believe me, “quietly” never entered into that scenario.
Larry Smith didn’t talk quietly, or listen quietly; he didn’t even move into a room quietly. He could make coffee nervous. He was a jolt of 5-Hour Energy, way before any such product ever gleamed in its creator’s eye. He had played trumpet as a younger man, and in a way, he still was a jazz trumpet – short, resonant, taking the lead, spilling sound in a steady stream.
Smith had a well-tuned carburetor of a voice, sharply resonant with a slight growl, and just the right amount of grease. He was compact and wiry, with a short man’s temperament. He always seemed ready to grapple with something – any argument, any assailant, whether truly threatening or merely perceived – with a broad, tight smile that suggested he’d enjoy the skirmish and had no doubts as to the outcome. By the time we met he’d been doing things his way, on the air and elsewhere, for more than three decades, and he had pretty strict ideas about how things should operate.
Case in point: I would often run a minute or two past 1 AM with the last tune of my shift. Rather than fade it out, or substitute something shorter, I figured it didn’t much matter at that point of the morning; and anyway, Larry had four hours to fill, so why would he care? One night, when he swept in with his usual hustle and verve, I mentioned I’d need a bit more time, and he expressed some mild irritation. “C’mon Larry,” I said, “it’s just a minute or two.”
“They add up!” he snapped back at me. “They add up!”
We didn’t have much in common. Larry had grown up black in a racially segregated era, starting his career in the early 50s; I grew up white on Long Island, coming of age with the civil rights movement, and began my own career some 20 years after he had. Larry spent his teen years listening to jazz radio when jazz was the only music on the radio; I managed to find two or three stations still playing jazz in New York, and spent the rest of my time listening to the new “progressive rock” FM outlets sprouting in the 1960s.
By the time we met, I’d absorbed the radio lessons of my own youth, and I worked hard to string together intricate (less patient listeners might term them “baroque”) sets of jazz tunes, dovetailing them into and out of each other, often with the intent of creating some meta-statement about the music. Larry, like the late Dick Buckley before him, played it straight. He’d slam on a killer track, then use the fade-out to re-introduce himself – “I’m Larry Smith. Sit back and let me swing ya!” – maybe mention a couple of factoids about the tune, and thwack, he’d slam on another spiffy, up-tempo, horns-and-rhythm powerhouse of a tune.
Arriving at WBEZ in the early 80s, Larry had played enough of those tunes, for enough radio stations over enough years, that regular listeners had their own nickname for the on-disc speedballs he sent spinning over the airwaves. Blakey & The Messengers burning through a blues? Bird and Diz shooting blurry darts at the microphone? Clifford Brown running the steeplechase with Sonny Rollins? To Chicago listeners, it was all “Larry Smith Music” – jive on in, and check your subtlety at the door.
And within that somewhat narrow range, Larry was lethal. He instilled in his loyal audience a considerable respect, and a sometimes giddy glee, by locating and returning again and again to the hardest-charging, the finger-poppin’est – the “fieriest” (pronounced fahreest) – track on any given LP or CD.
Take him out of his hard-bop element, you could run into trouble. In one spectacularly ill-conceived instance, Larry was asked to interview the late Dutch musician Willem Breuker, leader of the post-modern, avant-garde band known as Willem Breuker Kollektief. Larry spent the entire segment addressing Breuker as “Mr. Kollektief,” to the enduring puzzlement of Breuker (and his audience).
But as long as he could stick with his first and only love – music of the 40s, 50s, and 60s, preferably featuring a blazing young trumpeter and a no-holds-barred drummer – both Larry and his audience had little to worry about. They gloried in the music and in his colloquial neologisms, which became almost as vital as the music in his programs. (Among my favorites was “strabaganda,” a delightful corruption of “extravaganza,” slurred into submission by his rushed elocution.)
In the mid-90s, an attempt was made to mold the styles of the WBEZ jazz hosts into a more uniform sound. It pivoted on segues between tracks; a greater emphasis on variety (vocals, Latin jazz, ballads); and a modicum of convergence among all the hosts toward those new releases we could all support, regardless of our divergent tastes.
I certainly didn’t object; after all, this “new sound” hewed closely to what I was already doing on the air. But Larry (and Dick Buckley, for that matter) found these changes difficult to adopt, which should come as no surprise: he had decades of his own experience to rely on for what he regarded as “good radio,” and legions of fans to back him up. Consequently, his efforts to meet the new hourly requirements, designed to unify the WBEZ jazz sound, were somewhat half-hearted.
But he certainly didn’t deserve the punitive way in which the new marching orders were applied – by a power-hungry and maybe even sadistic music director – in Larry’s final years. His long career argued that these changes be imposed with a little finesse; that didn’t happen, and the station management stood back and watched as this petty dismantlement continued, making the last years at his chosen profession an unnecessary trial.
I may not have agreed with Larry’s on-air approach, but he had his audience, and he had a history. The people in charge at WBEZ ignored both those facts, and the manner in which they did so remains on my short list of unforgettable misdeeds.
Larry left the station in 2005, and reports of his health proved distressing: a heart attack or stroke, and then rumors of dementia or Alzheimer’s. He died on June 24 at the age of 81 (not 83, as reported elsewhere), apparently of heart failure.
Those who spoke at his well-attended funeral on Saturday homed in on his 55-year career, his more endearing quirks, his enduring appetite for fast-flying music. They included many of his old radio colleagues, but also several older musicians, who’d grown up with him and who recalled his weekly live “Jazz Party” events, as well as the overnight jam sessions at the former WBEZ studios in the Loop.
And several more who'd come to church were “only” listeners, drawn to say goodbye to a man they’d come to trust on the radio for a certain sound and an uncompromised approach. Radio is the damnedest thing: so personal to those on the receiving end, while the guy behind the microphone might never know how much of what he says has any impact on however many people. Larry knew, though. And I think he’d be especially pleased by those folks – the “only listeners” – who made the trek to swing him off.
(You can read more comments from Larry’s radio co-workers on Justin Kaufmann’s WBEZ blog here.)
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