The Metro Word, Toronto
The hollow tones of a Steelpan might seem a major disadvantage for the warm note-bending playing required in jazz soloing, but with a delicate style of improvisation and careful attention to each song´s structure, Smith has defied convention and emerged as a sought-after player.
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Svend Asmussen
I have been a secret fan of Rudy´s for many years - from the moment i first heard him, I´ve been raving about his incredible musicianship, his impeccacble taste and soulful phrasing. He and Toots Thielemans, who both make you forget the unsurmountable technical defficulties of their respective instruments, belong in my personal gallery of heroes with Louis, Duke, Bird, Stuff, Stan, Dizzy and a few that you probably never heard of.
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Ernie Wilkins
I just think it´s marvelous album and Rudy is one of a kind. I have never heard a steel-drum player like him before in my life! I am very impressed with his compositions.
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Mark Miller, The Globe and Mail, Toronto
It would be all too easy to make a fuss about the apparent novelty of the steel drum as a jazz instrument. The sound of the pan, after all, is the sound of calypso, not of bebop- or blues-note, at least, until Rudy Smith, a trinidadian musician traveling out of Copenhagen, strikes the first notes of a hip tune like John Coltrane´s "Some Other Blues". Damned if it isn´t perfectly natural.
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Krister Malm, Ph. D., musicologist, Sweden
Double alto pan player Rudy Smith has started a new phase in the story of pan. And not only in the story of the pan but in the story of Afro-American music. Rudy Smith has married the most important Afro-Carribian invention in the field of musical instruments, the steelpan, to the most important Afro-American musical tradition, the jazz. And more than that. He has developed a solo style of the steelpan which has not been heard before. His technique is dazzling. But it is not a question of empty virtuosity. Rudy Smith´s playing is marked by the same astonishing inventiveness that has created the steelpan.
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Thorbjoern Sjoegren, Berlingske Tidende, Denmark
It may perhaps be rather natural (and easy) to consider the use of steel-drums in jazz as something of curiosity, but the way in which Rudy Smith handles his two 50 cm-wide metal things it is not difficult for him to convince us of thier legitimate use in jazz.
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