Pedal-steel player Scott Smith joins Tony Wilson to pay tribute to 1978 LP Minors Aloud
Pair reinterprets Emmons-Breau album that brought together jazz and country in new ways—and continues to blow minds
Tony Wilson and Scott Smith fund out they both owned a copy of the hard-to-fine Minors Aloud, from 1978.
The Coastal Jazz & Blues Society presents Scott Smith and Tony Wilson’s tribute to Lenny Breau and Buddy Emmons at Ironworks on February 18 at 7 pm, at Ironworks as part of Ironfest 2: Electric Boogaloo. Just a Season hosts a release party for Leave to Come Home at the Hollywood Theatre on March 12, as part of a double bill with Marin Patenaude.
IT’S NOT LIKE jazz and country hadn’t met before: that’s what western swing was all about, right? But when Nashville session ace Buddy Emmons and Canadian fingerstyle guitarist Lenny Breau issued their Minors Aloud LP in 1978, no one had heard anything quite like it. With Emmons applying his impeccable pedal-steel technique to uptempo bebop numbers like Charlie Parker’s “Scrapple from the Apple” and Breau going all Chet Atkins on a theme borrowed from Johann Sebastian Bach, the record was almost impossible to categorize, but it was also undeniably new.
And Minors Aloud continues to blow minds, as local multi-instrumentalist Scott Smith will testify.
“I started playing pedal steel around 2000, and if I saw a pedal-steel instrumental record in a store, I would basically just buy it, you know, ’cause you’d hardly ever see them,” he recalls, reached on his cell phone while on his way to collect some instruments from a North Vancouver repair shop. “So I bought that one, listened to it a bit—and at that time it was kind of like mind-boggling. I can understand what Buddy Emmons is doing now, but when I first heard that record it was just kind of inconceivable, what was going on there.”
For a long time, Smith thought he was the only local member of the Breau/Emmons fan club. “I never met anyone else who was familiar with that record,” he notes. After forming Reach for the Sky with guitarist Tony Wilson and singer Debra-Jean Creelman, however, he discovered he was not alone.
“I played pedal steel in that band,” he says. “And then one day Tony was like ‘Have you ever heard that Minors Aloud album?’ And I’m like ‘Yeah, I own that album!’ And he was like ‘No way! We’ve got to do that album some day!’”
Smith’s initial reaction was that he’d just been asked to climb Mount Everest. “But obviously every year that goes by you get better at your instrument, and then I stated doing this thing at the Heatley called Adventures in Pedal Steel in 2016, and that was great,” he says. “Every month we would focus on a different steel artist and do their repertoire, and at some point, maybe three years ago, me and Tony first did that album in its entirety. And we’ve probably done it five or six times over the last few years.”
Response has been so good that Smith and Wilson—plus drummer Liam MacDonald and bassist Jeremy Holmes—have been booked to reprise their Emmons/Breau tribute as part of the Coastal Jazz and Blues Society’s Ironfest 2: Electric Boogaloo mini-festival, which takes place at Ironworks this weekend. You can safely expect to hear stellar musicianship, and some nods to the technical innovations pioneered by the original players; Wilson, for instance, has fully incorporated Breau’s signature octave harmonics into his own considerable bag of tricks. But don’t expect to hear Minors Aloud replicated note for note, because what would be the point of that?
“We just sort of take the tunes and the vibe that they had on the album, and then we play it as jazz musicians,” Smith says. “We never copy their solos; we just play it the way the four of us play it. So it’s different—and sometimes radically different—every time.
“The other thing,” he adds, “is that a song like ‘Compared to What’ can be 13 minutes long—or even longer, depending on the mood we’re in. Sometimes that’s how the set goes, you know!”
Smith notes that jamming with Wilson isn’t the only way he’s been able to stretch out during the past couple of years of cancelled tours and limited live opportunities. He’s used his pandemic-induced downtime to set up a fully professional recording studio in the home he shares with his wife and kids, testing his engineering skills on an online-only album of pedal-steel instrumentals, Lifeboat, that’s miles away from the million-notes-a-minute ethos that sometimes dominates the original Minors Aloud. Dreamy, reflective, and showcasing a rainy West Coast aesthetic, tunes like “Feels Like Sunday” and “Floating Above It All” bear some kinship to the work of a more modern but equally fabled steel-and-guitar partnership, that of Greg Leisz and Bill Frisell.
“That was done right when Covid hit, and my calendar got wiped out for the year,” Smith says. “It was a strange time, as you know. It was a very strange feeling, like ’Who am I?’ All I’ve done since 1996 is play gigs and record with people. I mean, I’m a dad, I’m a husband; I know that, and that’s all good. But there were a lot of feelings going on, and these pieces were how I articulated them.
“I wrote a lot of songs as well,” he continues, noting that some of them will appear on his songwriting project Just A Season’s upcoming record Leave to Come Home, scheduled for a March release. “But my cousin passed away in that time, and that was also a tough thing to go through. It was a time when you couldn’t really mourn. You couldn’t have a funeral, you couldn’t even really get together to talk about it. So there were all these things going on, and I just wasn’t able to express everything that I was thinking with lyrics. Music just seemed like what I wanted to do.”
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