Jazz saxophonist Walter Smith III grew up in Houston and attended Kinder HSPVA.
It’s safe to say Houston played a role in shaping the career of jazz saxophonist Walter Smith III. Smith grew up in Houston with a father who was a band director, and he graduated from the Kinder High School for the Performing and Visual Arts.
While Smith has gone on to success beyond our city, the connections he made with his fellow musicians from the Bayou City continue to speak through his music — so much so that he’s released an album on the iconic jazz label Blue Note Records celebrating how Houston shaped him. And it brings several other successful Houston jazz musicians along for the ride.
Jazz musicians Walter Smith III, Jason Moran, Reuben Rogers, and Kendrick Scott collaborated on the album, “three of us are from Houston and Reuben is not.”
The album is wrly titled three of us are from Houston and Reuben is not. The three Houstonians include Smith, pianist Jason Moran, and drummer Kendrick Scott. And Reuben, by the way, is bass player Reuben Rogers, who hails from the U.S. Virgin Islands.
In an interview with Houston Matters producer Michael Hagerty (in the audio above and video below), Smith talks about how experiences at the defunct jazz listening room Cézanne and walking the streets of Montrose while at HSPVA inspired the respective tracks on the album, Cézanne and Montrose Nocture. And he explains how a familiar section of highway in his hometown became another track on the album, called 610 Loop.
Smith, Moran, Scott, and Rogers will perform from the album in a concert for DACAMERA Friday night at 8 the Wortham Center.