Kansas Smitty's House Band
Having spent a pleasant couple of hours enjoying some pizza and a few beers I was more than ready for my reason for being in the festival grounds – to head into the Spiegeltent and submerse myself in London jazz sensations Kansas Smitty’s House Band. This eight piece band of twenty somethings who also run their own bar had drawn a large crowd ready to be entertained by the band’s mix of jazz styles.
It’s this mix which makes the band such an interesting live prospect – they cover trad, modern, swing, Cuban and European jazz all within the space of a few songs. Instrumental modern is my preference so I particularly enjoyed the tracks where Pete Horsfall’s trumpet was the lead instrument, shades of Miles Davis there. The Gypsy/French style jazz they played was also excellent, channelling their inner Django Reinhardts. As with all live jazz I’ve seen, high levels of musicianship are required and the Smitty boys had it in spades. All of the band deserve praise but leader Giacomo Smith was a particularly cool cat; I especially enjoyed the way he would introduce the next track over the end of the one they were still playing, it gave the set a nice flow. I also loved drummer Pedro Segundo – a more joyous exuberant sticksman you’d be hard pushed to find - he even added some washboard into his percussive armoury.
It’s testament to their talents that the majority of the set were all original songs, although I did really enjoy the Jellyroll Morton cover which featured some great clarinet playing from Adrian Cox. Negative comments seem churlish, but once again some of the attendees in the Spiegeltent were there purely to converse with each other, seemingly with zero interest in the band – not this specific band, but whatever happened to be on. For the most part though, the crowd loved them, the atmosphere built nicely throughout the set, some people did some proper dancing down the front and by the end we’d all been completely charmed. If only there was a bar in Norwich with a house band this good.
