[Dixielandjazz] Betty Smith

[Steve Voce]

  Betty Smith: Saxophonist and singer hailed for her improvisational panache

/Friday, 28 January 2011/

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Smith: 'I would have been a trombonist but my arms were too short' 
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Smith: 'I would have been a trombonist but my arms were too short'

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It was rare to find a woman jazz musician in the Fifties. Even more rare 
to find one who played hotter jazz than her colleagues. The tenor 
saxophonist Betty Smith was one such.

"There was a trombone tradition in my family," she said. "They were all 
trombonists except me. I would have been one too, but my arms were too 
short."

Wartime austerity still lingered in 1950. The uniforms of the musicians 
in trumpeter Freddy Randall's Dixieland/Chicago-styled band looked more 
appropriate to attendants at a caravan park than to a leading jazz band. 
Certainly they did Betty Smith no favours, and when we first saw her on 
stage she looked chunky and without glamour. And then she played...

Randall's band toured the well-worn circuit of one-nighters covered by 
trad and Dixieland bands around Britain. The audiences felt sentimental 
about New Orleans jazz and it was a time for mawkish, tear-stained 
clarinet rather than efficient and swinging saxophone. In fact, Betty's 
was virtually the only tenor sax ever seen on the circuit. With the 
exception of those led by Humphrey Lyttelton and Chris Barber, the bands 
were mainly technically inept. But in Randall's band the standards were 
much higher and while he was a trumpet virtuoso Betty Smith swung and 
improvised with all the panache of her American counterparts Bud Freeman 
and Eddie Miller.

Unlike the callow youths of the trad bands, Betty Smith had a 
professional career behind her before she turned to small-group jazz. 
She'd begun playing the alto sax when she was nine in Archie's Juveniles 
and began concentrating on jazz in her early teens.

In 1947 she had toured the Middle East with pianist Billy Penrose and 
then joined Ivy Benson's evening-gown clad Girls' Band. She had flown to 
Germany to play for officials off duty from the Nuremberg trials and in 
1948, at the very beginning of the Berlin Airlift, she was flown into 
the city with Rudy Starita's All Girls Band to play for the troops.

"I'm still owed 40 quid for that gig," she sniffed.

In 1950 she joined Randall's band and a few years later went to the 
States with the band in exchange for Louis Armstrong's visit to Britain. 
Randall became ill soon after and broke upthe band in 1957. Betty Smith 
then formed her own quintet, which included her husband, the bassist 
Jack Peberdy, and another jazz virtuoso, the pianist Brian Lemon.

Her trip to the States had whet her appetite and she returned with the 
quintet, touring on the same programme as Bill Haley's Comets. Her 
record of "Bewitched" reached the American hit parade. She proved 
skilled at finding work and the quintet played summer seasons in 
Guernsey and other places. The group had a residency on the liner 
Franconia and she played and sang -- for she was a good vocalist -- with 
the Ted Heath Orchestra. She did a lot of radio and television work and 
for a while had her own radio programme on Radio Luxembourg.

The high quality of her playing brought her into the orbit of another 
trumpet virtuoso, Kenny Baker, and they worked together often over the 
rest of her career. When Baker and two more ex-Ted Heath musicians, 
trombonist Don Lusher and drummer Jack Parnell, formed a sextet called 
the Best of British Jazz in the early 1970s she was a founder-member and 
remained the only saxophone player in the band until she became ill in 1985.

Baker waited until 1992 to see whether she would recover; when she did 
not he reformed the band. In the 1980s she appeared with Eggy Ley's 
Hotshots and at several jazz festivals, but her illness persisted and 
herhusband Jack looked after her for the rest of her days. She continued 
to sing and play the piano until a week before her death.

/Steve Voce/

*Betty Smith, tenor saxophonist, vocalist, bandleader: born Sileby, 
Leicestershire 6 July 1929; married 1950 Jack Peberdy; died Kirby 
Muxloe, Leicestershire 21 January 2011.*

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