Joshua Smith Quartet at Bop Stop

Saxophonist Joshua Smith returns to BOP STOP with his quartet. The band is touring leading up to a recording session for Smith's next album.

Leading a quartet is a natural state of being for a modern jazz saxophonist. There is a completeness to the combination of saxophone and rhythm section, blazing a trail of swinging cohesive communication through the night air onstage. Saxophonist Joshua Smith started leading his jazz quartet around Cleveland, Ohio, as a teenager in the mid-1990’s and has continued expertly doing so through the years, often collaborating with some notable players and stalwart working jazz players as sidemen in his groups....

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Saxophonist Joshua Smith returns to BOP STOP with his quartet. The band is touring leading up to a recording session for Smith's next album.

Leading a quartet is a natural state of being for a modern jazz saxophonist. There is a completeness to the combination of saxophone and rhythm section, blazing a trail of swinging cohesive communication through the night air onstage. Saxophonist Joshua Smith started leading his jazz quartet around Cleveland, Ohio, as a teenager in the mid-1990’s and has continued expertly doing so through the years, often collaborating with some notable players and stalwart working jazz players as sidemen in his groups.

Last November, The Joshua Smith Quartet performed a blistering set to a packed house for the Jazz Foundation of America at the Jazz Museum of New Orleans. And they more recently played a Bay Area performance which brought down the house in Oakland California.

This upcoming tour will feature 3 longtime collaborators of Smith’s. The inimitable stylings of New York bassist Kim Cass (John Zorn, Bill McHenry, Noah Preminger), Keigo Hirakawa on piano (Robert Hearst), as well as Hamir Atwal (Tuneyards) on drums. All three of these sidemen have gigged with Smith dating back more than a decade.

This quartet will be bubbling over with musicality, versatility, and communicative jazz prowess. Smith’s original jazz compositions and reworked standards played by this group will delight all manner of jazz lovers from casual listeners to grizzled veteran listeners of the form. The group performs with a deep feeling of reverence, recognizing their responsibility to explore and push their individual limits as players of jazz.

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