Drumming Legend Steve Smith Talks Vital Information’s New Album, Making Jazz His Home Base & Past Journey Triumphs (INTERVIEW)

Photo by Alejandro Padron

Steve Smith was nursing a little tour fatigue when he called in for our recent interview. He had been out on a short run with his band Vital Information, a Jazz ensemble he has been recording within various incarnations since 1983. Although he is widely known in the rock & roll world as the drummer on some of Journey’s most popular hits – “Don’t Stop Believin’,” “Separate Ways,” “Any Way You Want It,” “Faithfully” and “Who’s Crying Now” – Smith has always called Jazz his home base. As a pre-teen growing up near Boston, he took drum lessons from a local Jazz teacher. He toured with renowned Jazz violinist Jean-Luc Ponty before hooking up with Ronnie Montrose for his solo tour. Jazz was there in his playing then and it’s there now. It’s his passion.

Smith has certainly made a name for himself in the Jazz world. His band Vital Information just released their 17th album, Time Flies, and it’s a sparkler. If you’ve never heard Smith play Jazz, you’re in for a treat. With Janek Gwizdala on bass and Manuel Valera on keys, the trio weaves in and out of intricate heartbeat rhythms and sassy time signatures. The title track is a masterclass in what clicking together in all the right moments can sound like; “Self-Portrait” begins with a lovely tranquil piano intro that rides itself all the way through; while their interpretation of Thelonious Monk’s “Ugly Beauty” is almost a dream come true. Jazz may be an acquired taste, especially for those die-hard rock fans not used to more complicated improvisations, but it’s always worth going to the roots of your favorite musicians to see how they incorporated their inspirations into rock & roll. And Steve Smith had a lot to share with us about those methods, in Jazz and rock.

How old were you when you really started to understand what Jazz is about?

I started drumming in 1963, which at this point is now sixty years ago (laughs). I was nine years old in 1963 and that was when I started drumming. I started by taking private lessons. My parents found me a teacher near this little town I grew up in, Whitman, Massachusetts, and there was a drum teacher in Brockton, Massachusetts, and which is about twenty-five miles south of Boston. When I went to that teacher, Billy Flanagan, he was a Jazz drummer and it was pretty common in those days that if one was to study drums one would study with a Jazz teacher because rock was not as popular as it is now, or was to become shortly after that time. 

All the teachers were Jazz drummers so by the time I was about twelve, I was very into Jazz. So it coincided with my drum lesson from a Jazz-oriented drum teacher and then my own listening of what appealed to me. And what appealed to me musically in those days was Big Band Jazz: Buddy Rich Big Band, Stan Kenton Big Band, Count Basie, Maynard Ferguson. And all of these bands were on tour at that time and living in the Boston area and I got to see all of those bands perform. So that was very exciting for me as a young musician growing up. 

So my roots in Jazz go back to the beginning of me starting drumming in 1963. It wasn’t until around 1967 and 1968 that I actually started to get an interest in rock music and that came about because I heard the drummer in Jimi Hendrix’s group, Mitch Mitchell, and he sounded like a Jazz drummer to me, so I could relate to him. Then I heard Cream with Ginger Baker and then Led Zeppelin with John Bonham and I could relate to their Jazz-oriented approach to rock drums. So by the end of the sixties, I really had a record collection that was equal parts Jazz and equal parts rock, which of course then lead to the next musical development that came along, which is the combination of the two, Jazz Rock Fusion, which literally is putting together Jazz and rock and creating a music that has elements of each. That’s how far back it goes for me.

When you hear Jazz drumming in other players, what exactly do you hear?

It’s like a swing approach, a very triplet-oriented approach. Like if you listen to Jimi Hendrix and listen closely to the drumming, Mitch Mitchell could have been playing in a Jazz group. And that approach of the Jimi Hendrix Experience was very Jazz-oriented. They weren’t playing strict beats. The drums were loose and interpretive and Mitch Mitchell would comment, let’s say, on what Jimi Hendrix was doing in a way that is what happens in Jazz. And that’s just one example. With John Bonham with Led Zeppelin it was also free, it was loose and swinging with a lot of triplet-oriented feels and fills.

If you had never done rock & roll, what do you think your drumming today would be missing?

(laughs) I don’t know. What I can tell you is the fact that I did play rock music and it brought a compositional element to my drumming. One of the things I learned by playing rock was that I needed to come up with drum parts that were devised in order to play songs, which is a different approach than interacting with musicians in a way that is based more on improvisation. So the rock drumming brought a compositional approach to my drumming.

For Time Flies, how did you want it to be different from the others you’ve recorded with Vital Information?

One thing that’s very different on this album is that the group is a trio and in the past, my groups have been a quartet or a quintet. I’ve had either guitar, keyboards, bass and drums or guitar, saxophone, keyboards, bass, and drums. Or from the first album, it was saxophone, two guitars, bass and drums. So having a piano-oriented trio is a very different approach for my Vital Information group and that evolved in a kind of natural evolution that it became a trio. It actually happened in 2020 and through a variety of influences, one of them being covid and the fact that I was doing some touring but not all the band members could make it to Australia. I had a week in Australia and I took Manuel Valera on keyboards, the keyboard player on Time Flies, and nobody else could make it so I used a bass player that I met in Australia and we played as a trio for a week in a club called Bird’s Basement in Melbourne, Australia. And I was surprised but pleased that it went so well and the group really sounded very good. Manuel Valera did an amazing job playing all the melodies and the chords and soloing and the group sounded very complete as a trio. So after that, which was March of 2020, we had to come right back to the US and everyone was locked down in the music world, and the rest of the world. But that’s when I decided to continue on as a trio cause it worked so well.

Something good came out of something bad

Yeah, it was interesting and when it came time to record the album, I knew that I wanted to go in that direction. And I knew the bass player I wanted to use, Janek Gwizdala. I had toured with him before in some other groups where we were both sidemen and he had done some work with Vital Information when my bass player had some health issues and couldn’t play. So I knew he would be the perfect bass player for this endeavor. Not only is he a great bass player but he’s a great soloist. And when the group is only three people, everyone has to be a strong soloist in this environment, and that way all three of us can be expressive and play an evening’s worth of music that stays interesting.

What is the biggest difference when recording a rock album versus a Jazz album? Is there a difference?

Yes, there is a difference between recording a rock album and recording a Jazz album. In both cases, the drums are the foundation of the music but with a rock album, the drums give the compositional structure to the music and generally, there is not much in the way of improvisation. That is more, let’s say, a result of rock being more composition-oriented. Especially in the last twenty to thirty years, rock drumming has become MORE along the lines of being very compositional because so many composers use drum computers to write their music and they get very attached to the drum parts they come up with. As a session drummer, I’ve done a lot of rock session work, many times I end up literally reproducing the drumming that is on the demo that somebody comes up with. That’s very different than what I was discussing with the rock in the late sixties, Mitch Mitchell and Ginger Baker and John Bonham and another drummer I really loved in those days, Ian Paice with Deep Purple. The music was freer than it became in those years.

Recording a Jazz album, the drums are just as compositional and the foundation base but there is a lot of room for improvisation and interaction with the other musicians. In fact, if I played the same beat all the way through a Jazz tune, that would be very static sounding and it wouldn’t have the element that makes Jazz very listenable and enjoyable, as far as I’m concerned. It’s that interaction with all the musicians and how the drummer interacts with the bass player, the keyboard player, and in other cases, this new Vital Information record, let’s say, interacting with the saxophone player. Actually, there is a saxophone on this album, just not on all of the songs. George Garzone plays on some of the music as well as Mike Mainieri plays vibes on one of the songs [“No Qualm”]. So there was that opportunity to interact with those musicians as we recorded. That’s a very different approach, where there’s a demand for freedom and a loose approach to the music.

What about when you’re preparing for a tour? Is it more time-consuming to do a Jazz tour than a rock tour?

No, they both take time to learn the music. When I prepared to do Journey tours, say from 2016 to 2019, when I relearned those songs that I hadn’t played in over thirty years, that took a lot of work to memorize quite a few songs (laughs). When I prepare for a Jazz tour, also it takes a long time to learn the music because when I’m in the studio with Vital Information, I’m reading music as I record it, because we’re playing songs that were brand new, that we hadn’t recorded before. So I read while I’m in the studio. But for live, I want to memorize everything. So it took me, I’d say, about three weeks to memorize all of the music so when I did the tour that we just did – we just did a West Coast tour – I was prepared and didn’t read music for the tour, which I think it looks better onstage and I’m also a little more free as I don’t have to be reading music while performing it live.

Are you more comfortable in improvisational mode versus a more regulated structured situation?

Sure, I do prefer the more improvisational situation. It’s a preference. I can do the rock drumming and I am capable of doing it, and while doing it I am doing it because I know how to do it and I devote myself to that craft. But given a choice, my preference is playing Jazz and playing with Jazz musicians. I have more in common with them, as far as background, my approach and my love of music. I resonate more with the Jazz musicians.

For the title track, “Time Flies,” what was the conception of that?

Really what happened with that is that trio had been in the studio before George Garzone arrived and we had recorded the Bud Powell tune, “Tempus Fugue-It” and simply suggested, let’s play something that’s harmonically related to “Tempus Fugue-It,” but it’s a simple groove, something that we can put either before or after it. Tempo-wise, I wanted it to be about half the tempo of “Tempus Fugue-It.” And that’s exactly what we did. I just counted off a groove, counted off a tempo and the four of us improvised and what you hear is that improvisation that we just came up with in the moment; just played it one time and it felt great and sounded good to us so we moved on.

“Self-Portrait” has the beautiful classical piano intro but I understand this is actually a tune that goes pretty far back with you.

Right. The composer of that tune is Mike Mainieri, who is the band leader and vibes player for a group called Steps Ahead, and in 1986, I became a band member of Steps Ahead and one of the songs that we were playing was that tune, “Self-Portrait,” and I’ve played it over the years. Once I started playing in Steps Ahead, I continued to play with the group on and off, and actually right up until 2019, the last gig I played with them. Mike Mainieri would sometimes use a different drummer, different bass player, different sax players and so he’d call me for some tours, wouldn’t call me for other tours, so it’s actually a very good situation to revisit the music and play that music at different periods in my life and musical development. So that is a beautiful tune and it was actually the idea of Manuel Valera to play that song and it was one of the songs that we started playing in Australia during our week down there. And again, it just sounded so good we continued to play it when we started playing live gigs again. 

Then both Janek and Manuel wanted to record it on the album. I wasn’t even sure if we should record it (laughs). It’s been recorded a number of times but they really insisted and we played a beautiful version of that. I’m really happy with the way it came out. Then of course I invited Mike Mainieri to play on a song but not that song. He plays on a tune called “No Qualm,” which I felt like was a really perfect showcase for him. In some ways that song reminds me of some of the Steps Ahead music and therefore it seemed the perfect choice to have him play vibes on that with us.

You do Thelonious Monk’s “Ugly Beauty” and you’ve covered him several times on record before. What resonates from his music with you?

I’ve actually played a lot of Thelonious Monk’s music but mainly in New York in the Jazz clubs in live situations. The music is very challenging and lends itself to very open improvisation and very open to interpretation. But one of the reasons I’ve recorded Monk tunes over the years is because the band members in Vital Information have liked the music and come up with interesting arrangements and brought them to the group and so we’d play them. Like Mark Soskin, who was the keyboard player on the last few records, he brought in “Rhythm-A-Ning,” and I can’t remember what the other Monk tune was, but he brought in some really great arrangements. And just like on this album, Manuel came up with the really innovative arrangement of “Ugly Beauty,” because the original tune is in ¾ and he came up with a 5/4 interpretation of “Ugly Beauty.”

Where have you been in the world where they seem to really appreciate the drums and highlights them over other instruments, in your opinion?

Well, if I only have to choose one country, I would say India. There is such a highly developed drumming culture in India. In North India, the main drum is the tabla, and in South India it’s mridangam and kanjira and ghatam, which is a clay pot. There is such drumming traditions that drummers can play solo concerts or concerts where two or three drummers play together. I’ve been to India quite a few times and witnessed 2000 to 3000 people watching solo drum concerts and just loving it. And when I have toured there, I have experienced it, the extreme openness and appreciation of drumming and rhythm, sophisticated rhythm.

In your career, what has been the most difficult song you’ve had to transfer to the live stage?

I can’t say there’s one particular song because in every tour that I’m hired to do there will be particular tunes that may take more time to learn than others but once I learn it then I have it. But I will say, and I can’t remember the exact year, but I think it was like the early 2010s – 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014 – and I toured with a pianist named Hiromi and she is a virtuoso Jazz pianist. Some of her music was very difficult to learn and perform live. That was some of the hardest music that I’ve ever had to learn. The names of the albums that I played on were called The Trio Project. I didn’t play on the studio recordings – a drummer named Simon Phillips played on the studio recordings – but I did a lot of the live shows and that was pretty difficult music to learn. But it was quite satisfying, learning hard music and then playing it well. It is very satisfying.

Was it intimidating coming into Journey and taking over for Aynsley Dunbar?

It was not intimidating taking over for Aynsley and I really like Aynsley’s drumming. He’s another one, as I was describing, like Mitch Mitchell and Ginger Baker, that I think comes from a similar Jazz/rock orientation and his drumming on the early Journey albums is really fantastic and very appropriate for those records. But I had been on tour with a guitarist named Ronnie Montrose and we opened for Journey for three months so I got to hear Aynsley play every night and then we became friends. I definitely have a lot of respect for Aynsley and his drumming. But coming into the group, I was not thinking about taking his place as much as I was thinking about bringing something new to the music. So I wasn’t trying to play in his style or play in any way related to the way he played. I was coming in with a new concept and that was my focus.

You mentioned Ronnie Montrose. What did you learn from him about being a band leader?

Ronnie was a very relaxed type of band leader and he didn’t give us a lot of direction. He let us come up with the way that we wanted to interpret the music and I think that he allowed us a lot of freedom. So that was somewhat new to me at that time. I had played with a lot of different groups coming up but I had not toured on that professional level very much. The band leader that I was working with right before that was Jean-Luc Ponty, the French fusion violinist. He had a lot of ideas of how he wanted his music performed. So he gave more direction to the band members, and rightly so, cause he had written this very sophisticated music and he wanted it performed in a certain way. But Ronnie was a lot looser than that, and in fact the music was a little looser so it all made sense, it all worked together.

You played on Richie Kotzen’s first album. Tell us about that experience because that was Shrapnel stuff, the ultra fast stuff.

Yeah (laughs). The owner of Shrapnel Records, Mike Varney, was a friend of mine and he was someone that I knew when I was living in northern California. He hired me to play on some of those records, like Tony MacAlpine’s record, and I was able to do that, to adapt my playing to that style and that kind of music. And what Mike Varney did, how he found Richie Kotzen and how he found these various guitar players is he wrote a column for Guitar Player Magazine in those days and young players would send him cassette demos of them playing and he’d write about them in the magazine. But it also gave him the idea, well, maybe I should make an album of this guy. That’s how he started that label and Richie Kotzen was one of those young guitar players that he signed to his label. 

When Richie came to California to do the album, he came with his parents cause he was seventeen years old. So his mom and dad were at the session and he was very gifted and highly-developed for his age. Stu Hamm was the bass player on that and the tunes were in some ways quite unorthodox because Richie would have some odd bars; some of them were actually out of time that he conceived so it wouldn’t be in strict meter. I remember it was not an easy session (laughs). There were a lot of details we had to learn for that music and we didn’t have much time because those Shrapnel records were quite low budget records. We usually made them in about one or two days. So we would rehearse, we rehearsed at my house, I had a home studio, and I know we rehearsed there for a couple of days to learn the music and then went into the studio and recorded it. It was an interesting experience.

Of all the Journey albums that you played on, which one top to bottom do you feel you were on point and locked in at your highest potential?

Actually, the album Trial By Fire, the last one that we recorded with, let’s say, the classic Journey lineup. It doesn’t get a lot of attention but I really like that album and my drumming at that point had evolved a lot since I had made the albums Escape and Frontiers, the earlier Journey records. I had just done a lot of work on my playing and so when we went into the studio to record that album, my drumming was at a new place. And I’d done a lot of work technically to develop my technique to get it to be more fluid and smoother. Then I also had done a lot of studio work in the interim between 1985 and 1995 or 1996 when we made that record. So I’m really happy with my performance top to bottom on Trial By Fire.

Did you record the first Vital Information album before or after you finished Frontiers?

It was after, as far as I can remember. We recorded Frontiers probably near the end of 1982 and then in January 1983, I recorded the first Vital Information album and then shortly after I recorded that album, Journey went on tour to play the Frontiers music. Then in the fall of 1983, I toured the US with Vital Information, the early incarnation of Vital Information.

Was your core goal to be Jazz and not so much rock?

My career has always, in my mind, been about playing Jazz. But I’m pretty open-minded so when I had the opportunity to record rock, I’ve been able to do it and I enjoy doing it. But my preference if I’m going to go on tour and play music live, I want to play Jazz. And it’s not just with my band, it’s as a sideman and I’ve worked with a lot of great Jazz musicians as well. Like, I’ve already mentioned Steps Ahead and Hiromi. I’ve toured a lot with Mike Stern, a great guitarist. So my preference of live music is to play Jazz music, because it’s just a lot of fun for me. To play rock music live is a particular challenge but for the most part I’m recreating something that’s been recorded and the drum parts that I’m playing are more structured and need to be played very close to the albums night after night and that has it’s own challenge. But given the choice, I’d rather play much freer every night.

And what is the rest of your year looking like?

There is a tour of the East Coast in June, a Vital Information tour, and then the next thing that I do musically after that will be playing in the Jazz clubs in New York City in September and October. Mainly I’ll be playing at Birdland with some various all-star groups. And all that should be posted on my website, https://www.vitalinformation.com

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