For Howie Smith And Friends, Everything Old Is ‘Nous’ Again

Even at 83, saxophonist and composer Howie Smith remains an endless fount of surprises. You might even call his concert Friday night at BOP STOP a veritable Russian doll of surprises.

Start with the instrumentation, Smith on reeds, pianist Theron Brown and Aidan Plank on bass–great players all, but no drummer. Not unprecedented, maybe, but let’s call it novel.

But here’s where things get unusual: the concert is all ballads, start to finish—and not the Gershwin/Kern/Great American Songbook ballads you might expect to hear. Smith has reached back–a-waaaaaaaay back as Guardians Hall of Fame Announcer Tom Hamilton might say–to the Great European Songbook composers, Frankie Schubert and Jack Puccini. You know, The Cats.

“The thing I enjoy doing most is playing ballads all night long,” Smith told me by phone while he was grilling salmon last week. “There’s also a lot of really good material that, as a quote-unquote jazz musician, you don’t get a chance to play.”

Like what? Smith mentioned the aria from Alfredo Catalani’s opera “La Wally” that was a crucial plot element in Jean-Jacques Beineix’s 1981 art house film “Diva,” which Smith described as, “a beautiful thing. I said, ‘Man, that’d be a great tune to play,’ but I never followed through on it.”

So the idea for Friday’s concert had been marinating for a while, but when Smith saw Brown and Plank recently, it was ready for the grill, so to speak. “I mentioned it to them again, because I’ve mentioned it to them a number of times before, and they were enthusiastic about it. And so I went to Bryan [Kennard of BOP STOP] and he liked the idea. So he got us a date.”

You might be surprised that Brown and Plank will be covering classical composers. Yet you shouldn’t be. Plank has sat in the bass section of orchestras, including the Cleveland Orchestra, throughout his career, and as Smith reminded me, “Theron did the ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ with the Akron Symphony, I think it was last year.”

Smith calls this trio Nous, which is a Russian doll of meaning in its own right. In classical philosophy, nous is a kind of divine, primordial intelligence. In French, nous is the first-person plural pronoun, the equivalent of “we” or “us” and pronounced like “new.” So the trio’s name can be read as a super-intelligent “we” that’s brand new. Makes sense.

But Smith has a third surprise in store and it’s a good one. “I really don’t want people to know what they’re going to hear ahead of time because they may have preconceived ideas of what it’s going to sound like,” he said.

That’s a bold gambit, but longtime followers of Smith’s career might recognize it as nothing nous. His annual “Concerts In Progress” at Cleveland State University used the same conceit.

“Everybody who goes to a concert hears a different piece,” he explained, moving from Neoplatonism to the Buddhist Dhammapada. “That has to do with what music they’ve heard before, what they’ve been thinking about before they got there and when they’re there, they’re each sitting in a different place in the space where the music is being made. So acoustically it’s a slightly different experience for everybody as well.”

Fair enough, but with the exception of Smith, Brown and Plank, can we agree, entre nous, that everybody will have the same experience on one fundamental level? They won’t know what’s about to hit them. Let’s call it something old, something Nous, a few things borrowed, and–who knows?–maybe some blues.

Nous (Howie Smith, Theron Brown, Aidan Plank), Friday, July 24, 8 p.m., BOP STOP, 2920 Detroit Rd., Cleveland. Tickets $25, available here.

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For the most complete listing of jazz and jazz-adjacent events., look to Jim Szabo’s essential, weekly Northeast Ohio jazz calendar.