Globe Staff / March 7, 2010
In reverential tones as smooth as a series of big band chord changes ascending a scale, Ray Smith described how best to appreciate the music he played Sunday evenings on “Jazz Decades,’’ his program on WGBH-FM.
“You have to listen, listen,’’ he said in an autobiographical recording, which can be heard on the WGBH website, to commemorate his 35th anniversary on the radio station. “The real enjoyment is just shutting off all the other senses and concentrating on the listening. In other words, become all ears.’’
The thrill, he added, comes in “following how the melody flows through the instruments, the orchestration in the ensembles, and how it relates to the rhythm and the tempo. I’m talking music: harmonies, melodies, rhythms, tone, dynamics.’’
He talked about jazz for nearly 52 years, first on the former WKOX in Framingham, and since 1972 on WGBH. Mr. Smith, who also played drums in a series of jazz bands since the mid-1960s, died Feb. 26 in Savannah Memorial Hospital in Savannah, Ga., of congestive heart failure. He was 87 and lived in Bluffton, S.C., where he continued to put together his weekly WGBH show, more than a dozen years after moving south from his longtime home in Framingham.
“I pick my selections like I would a set for a dance band,’’ he told the Globe in August 2007, just before celebrating his 35th anniversary on WGBH. “Mostly, I go through my shelves and see what I haven’t played in a long time.’’
His shelves went on forever, or so it seemed. Mr. Smith estimated that he had recordings of more than 60,000 performances - some songs repeating from one artist to the next, of course. His record collection included thousands of 78s, LPs, and 45s. He owned hundreds of cassette tapes and as many CDs.
Like the music from the 1920s and ’30s that Mr. Smith kept alive, old trumped new in his collection. Nearly 9,000 78s lined shelves in his Framingham basement.
Read more: http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/obituaries/articles/2010/03/07/ray_smith_at_87_hosted_jazz_decades_on_wgbh/?rss_id=Most+Popular
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