The Joshua Smith Quartet

Joshua Smith - sax

Kim Cass - bass

Keigo Hirakawa - piano

Jeff Mellott - drums

Leading a quartet is a natural state of being for a modern jazz saxophonist. There is a completeness to the combination of saxophone and rhythm section, blazing a trail of swinging cohesive communication through the night air onstage. Saxophonist Joshua Smith started leading his jazz quartet around Cleveland, Ohio, as a teenager in the mid-1990’s and has continued expertly doing so through the years, often collaborating with some notable players and stalwart working jazz players as sidemen in his groups. 

Last November, The Joshua Smith Quartet performed a blistering set to a packed house for the Jazz Foundation of America at the Jazz Museum of New Orleans. And they more recently played a Bay Area performance which brought down the house in Oakland California.

This upcoming tour will feature 3 longtime collaborators of Smith’s. The inimitable stylings of New York bassist Kim Cass (John Zorn, Bill McHenry, Noah Preminger), Keigo Hirakawa on piano (Robert Hearst), as well as Hamir Atwal (Tuneyards) on drums. All three of these sidemen have gigged with Smith dating back more than a decade. 

This quartet will be bubbling over with musicality, versatility, and communicative jazz prowess. Smith’s original jazz compositions and reworked standards played by this group will delight all manner of jazz lovers from casual listeners to grizzled veteran listeners of the form. The group performs with a deep feeling of reverence, recognizing their responsibility to explore and push their individual limits as players of jazz.

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Joshua Smith is a jazz saxophonist whose music inhabits a space between worlds. Smith has co-lead the avant leaning trio Birth since it’s inception in 1998, but in addition to his work on the creative improvised music front, Joshua is also steeped in the Cleveland jazz culture of his youth, and has performed for years as a straight ahead jazz saxophonist. The Quartet he is leading in May 2025 will feature highlights from the cross section of these worlds. 

Joshua’s music carries the pedigree and tone of a stalwart saxophone warrior, but anyone familiar with his work also knows that Joshua has also held a potent space in his musical universe for some very highly refined improvisational music, having performed with improvisers and creative jazz musicians like Joe Maneri, Chris Jonas, Nate Wooley, Cuong Vu, Dan Plonsey, Ben Goldberg, Nels Cline, and a host of other folks, in addition to his work with his trio Birth, w/ Joe Tomino and Jeremy Bleich. He’s played with jazz luminary Joe Lovano, and leads a Cleveland-based group with Trio Tapestry drummer Carmen Castaldi. 

Joshua has lived several lives as a saxophonist. He grew up gigging in Cleveland, connecting with elder musicians like drummer Greg Bandy and trumpeter Kenny Davis, and subsequently spent time in New York, and on the east coast during would-be college years when he was touring heavily with his new formed trio Birth. Since that time, Joshua resided in the San Francisco Bay Area for 16 years, where he played with a who’s who of the music community there and spent several years as a member of The Scott Amendola Quartet, before relocating to New Orleans in the summer of 2020. 

Joshua has played with New Orleans mainstays like Papa Mali, Peter Harris, Simon Lott, Quinn Sternberg, Johnny Vidacovich, and many others, and he currently leads several groups in addition to his quartet including an improvising trio with guitarist Chris Alford and drummer Tom Chute. He often performs with his musical cohorts throughout the midwest and in the Bay Area.