Billy Bang, Sun Ra, John Ore, Andrew Cyrille

A Tribute To Stuff Smith is violinist Billy Bang's homage to the swing era fiddler whose unorthodox way of holding the instrument he had copied as a beginner, and it brings Sun Ra to the piano as a sideman. The link was deliberate. Ra had played with Stuff Smith decades earlier, and their duet on Deep Purple is believed to be the earliest released Sun Ra recording, so Bang chose him as a kind of passing of the baton. Recorded in New York in September 1992 for Soul Note, it is described by its annotator, who was in the studio, as Ra's last studio session.

The quartet is completed by bassist John Ore, who had played with Thelonious Monk, and drummer Andrew Cyrille, a regular partner of Bang's and a veteran of Cecil Taylor's groups. They recorded on September 20, 21 and 22, 1992 at Sear Sound, with Jon Rosenberg engineering and Flavio Bonandrini producing; Ra plays piano and synthesizer. The liner notes are by Steve Holtje, then working in Soul Note's New York office, who later published them with his memories of the date. He describes Ra in a wheelchair after a stroke, the session unrehearsed, and the band working out the structures as they went. Two Smith originals frame the programme. On Only Time Will Tell Ra's first solo is built on Monk-like chords, and Bugle Blues keeps the trumpet-call introduction that Smith played on violin; Ra counted the four-bar intro and came in on the fifth bar, which took the band some time to sort out. The rest are standards, from Satin Doll and April In Paris to Lover Man and Yesterdays, along with Deep Purple, which Bang found waiting on his music stand after lunch. Holtje quotes Bang on what mattered to him: "It's individual identity that is one of the most important things." Bang had studied with Leroy Jenkins and had played in the Sun Ra Arkestra himself, robe and headpiece included.

This is the Soul Note CD, catalogue number 121216-2, first released in 1993.