Boogie-woogie piano player Daniel Smith first appeared on the UK blues scene when he joined Sonny Black &

Boogie Woogie piano player Daniel Smith

first appeared on the UK blues scene when he joined Sonny Black & the Dukes. Since then, he has formed his own band and produced two albums. Just before Christmas 2002, Fran Leslie went to visit Dan in Ealing to hear his story.

picture courtesy of Eric Campbell

I started playing piano when I was about nine and I played for about eight years and I was classically trained as well but I got into it mainly because there was always Boogie Woogie going on.

My mother played a fair amount. My mother was Dutch-Indonesian. In 1948, the family left Indonesia because of the revolution. Because they were mixed race they couldn't stay; they were forced out by the Indonesians. In Indonesia, they were quite a privileged family.

My Dutch-Indonesian grandfather was head of customs in Jakarta. They had a nice big house and lived the colonial lifestyle, had grass tennis courts and servants.

He was also a jazz pianist in a band in Jakarta. My mother's brother was a really good boogie-woogie piano player and he played boogie-woogie in The Netherlands. From Scotland, we used to go across to The Netherlands every summer for four or five weeks. Scottish holidays used to be eight weeks long, so every summer I was infused (or enthused?) with boogie-woogie and blues piano, and jazz piano, from two generations above me.

My father had a lot of records: Meade Lux Lewis, Albert Ammons, Memphis Slim, Pat Boone, as I quite often say on gigs, he did try and sneak some of that in, Little Richard, all these people. He used to put all these records on.

In the winter months, I'd try and teach myself the left hand from these records. In the summer months, I'd learn from my Dutch uncle, a real Dutch uncle. My father, you can see from the paintings around here, he's an artist but he was quite musical although he didn't play any.

My mother was a triple immigrant. She went from Jakarta to The Netherlands. My father met her on an arts scholarship in Amsterdam. They got married. I was born in London. He's from Warrington. He started to apply for teaching jobs. He was struggling to make it as a lone artist; the first job he got offered was in Scotland, so we moved up there when I was a few months old.

As a teenager in Scotland, I really ploughed a lone furrow in terms of playing blues and boogie-woogie. Nobody knew what the hell it was. Everyone thought it was great but most of my friends were playing in the pipe band, with the drums and the bagpipes. This was in a village called Dollar, which is near Stirling in central Scotland.

I played for seven or eight years as a kid. I didn't know if I was any good or not. I studied music at school. I got the Scottish equivalent of A Level and gave up music at seventeen.

For the next eight or nine years, I hardly touched a piano. My main love at that time was sport. I wanted to be a professional sportsman. I did some professional tennis coaching. I played for Scotland at cricket, at youth level as well. I really wanted to be a professional cricketer. I went to Manchester University so I could try and join Lancashire Cricket Club and had trials and things. I also studied languages, Dutch and German, and that took me away from the UK. So for seven or eight years I didn't touch a piano. I was studying abroad, learning languages. I trained as a teacher and taught in five or six different countries: Turkey, Egypt, Portugal, Italy, Germany, which is all interesting.

picture courtesy of Jon Harris

When I finally came back to England in 1993, I took up the piano again. By complete chance, and because my girlfriend forced me to, I went for an audition with Sonny Black. It just really spiralled from there.

In my childhood, it was a very private thing for me. Although people loved it, I thought they thought it was a bit strange. When I lived in Germany for a year, I played once or twice in pubs and I always got a great reception when I did that, on two or three occasions because the Germans are mad about boogie-woogie. People like Big Man Clayton have gone across there because of that. Axel Zwingenburger and Vince Weber are my favourite piano players

In 93/94, I started going to folk clubs.

Then out of the blue, I heard, on the radio, that Sonny Black's old band had split up and he was looking for a keyboard player. Then the number was read out - David Freeman on a Sunday afternoon I think it was, on Jazz FM.

I had seen Bill (Boazman AKA Sonny Black) on the Friday night at The County Arms (Isleworth) when it was really going strong. Then on the Sunday it was announced that his band had split up but the David Freeman announced that actually they were still down to do a gig that Sunday evening.

Then Bill had obviously phoned up to say that 'the band are doing it (as The Mighty 45s) but it's not me and, while you are on air, can you read out that I need a keyboard player, a drummer and a bass player?' I wasn't going to go for the audition but my wife, as she is now, forced me to, saying I had nothing to lose. Bill took me on. I must have been pretty rough and ready but he obviously saw something and it took off from there. First and foremost, it was the only time I had really practiced intensely since I'd been a kid, practicing for examinations. And I did practice for about a year, because if you turn up with Bill and you're playing with him, Sam Kelly and George Pearson and Alan Glen, when he got involved, you suddenly think, "Well, I don't want to let the side down". I never practice now, I just don't have the time, but it did get me up to scratch on the playing front. Then Bill seemed quite happy for me to do a bit of gig finding, so I learnt the business end of music which stood me in good stead for going solo.

I stayed with Bill for six years. Then I decided to do my own album Southside Boogie, in 2000. I left Sonny Black & The Dukes on perfectly good terms, I should add. I owe Bill everything for taking me on, in the first place. I am eternally grateful for that. We still stay in touch and we meet for a drink now and then. I formed the Daniel Smith Blues Band and two years on from that produced my second album, Dreamtime. I've just been offered a deal on that with New Note so I'm hoping that they are going to re-release it in February or March.

The Daniel Smith Blues Band involves a couple of musicians that I met through Sonny Black: Alan Glen, who of course also plays with The Yardbirds currently. He was involved with Nine Below Zero and Dr Feelgood previously. He plays guitar and harmonica in the band. When he's not available, Jon ' T-Bone ' Taylor, your very own reviews editor, who also plays with his own band Bop Brothers, The Big Easy and others, and Dave Briggs who also plays with The Avengers and does gigs with people like Chuck Berry and Scotty Moore when they are in the country as well. I am very lucky to have a trio of such high-quality sidekicks available to me. Alan and Dave both do vocals as well. Dino Coccia is on drums; again I met him through Bill originally, and Jeff Walker on bass, originally it was George Pearson who doubled up in both bands but Jeff is the regular bass player and has been for a couple of years now. He plays upright, electric with frets or fretless as the mood takes him or as the size of vehicle we're travelling in dictates.

It's usually a four-piece band. I have recently started doing some five-piece work with what I call The Big Five Blues Band. It can also involve Bob Hadrell on Hammond organ along with a combination of the others. I've got a couple of gigs booked with Alan Barnes on saxophone, in the New Year, as well. Alan Barnes won the BBC Television Jazz Instrumentalist of the Year in 2001. Dino Coccia is a good friend of his and he appears on the Dreamtime album, so to help promote that he's doing a few gigs with us.

In the future, I'm looking to develop things, trying different combinations to continue writing as much as possible. There are eleven tracks on Dreamtime. Nine were written by me, one is by Alan Glen and Roger Cotton and the other is by Homesick James. That's how it panned out. I just happened to have a reasonable amount of material at the time. I do write quite intensely during school holidays. When I take a decent break, at Christmas, Easter and especially in the summer, a years worth of ideas and notes come to the fore and I just scribble everything down pretty franticly, wherever in the world I happen to be.

We recorded at Roger Cotton's Roundell studio, in Kent. Roger plays with Peter Green's Splinter Group and they recorded their recent album there as well. Sonny Black also does his albums there so we have a longstanding relationship with Roger. He's a great sound engineer and, more important, he's great at dispensing non-aggressive, non-threatening advice to musicians, about how they should play various things. He appears on one track on the CD as well, on Hammond organ.

For the Blues In Britain 2002 CD, you've picked what was at the time my favourite track from the album, "Fast Train Boogie". It's something I started to write when I was with Sonny Black, a while ago. I put it on the back burner. It's a straight-ahead boogie-woogie with a slightly different and more interesting and varied bass line because it's in a minor key. Although it's a twelve bar format, it diverges slightly from the straight traditional one, four, five chord sequence. Jon plays a great guitar solo on it. I just really like it. It's a kicking track. I hope everyone likes it.

I've got plenty of gigs lined up for this year. I've got several festivals booked. I am playing solo at a new festival in Tring in Hertfordshire, in March. Paul Lamb & The King Snakes are headlining and Jon T-Bone Taylor is playing with singer Colette Allen. I'm due at the Edinburgh Festival, which I did two years ago just with Alan Glen

picture courtesy of Eric Campbell

I'll take the band up this summer and do a tour of Scotland. I've got various other festivals booked in already

Gigs don't seem a problem. I've tried to cut back because of day job commitments. I was a teacher before I was a musician. It would be nice if one career took a nose-dive and I could concentrate on the other but, as is the way with things, they both seem to be progressing at an equal pace. I was doing ten to fifteen gigs a month quite recently but that's just crazy when I'm working full time. So I'm trying to do between half-a-dozen and ten a month.

I'm trying to produce a couple more albums in the next few years, see if I can get a concrete

record deal. The blues is a small market commercially and unless you are going to be on the road three-and-a-half weeks out of four, it's difficult to make ends meet. I do a lot of the arts centres and theatres. It's not like France and Germany. We played Norwich recently. We had two hundred and eighty people there and just sold huge numbers of CDs. If you had a few of them a month, that would do. They are few and far between and it's a competitive market. You've got plenty of people there, competing for the same gigs.

My singing is an area that I really need to develop. I used to sing in a choir but that's got no relation to anything whatsoever when it comes to the blues. I think I need to age twenty years and smoke forty fags a day to develop that side of things. It's getting better. I'm thirty-five and I was brought up in Scotland. I'm not black from Chicago. Having a vocalist in the band is something that I'm thinking about and looking at for quite a while but for practical and financial reasons and other reasons, it is quite difficult to find the right guy at the right time. I'll be playing the piano until the day I die.

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