Take the time to listen to Josh Smith play guitar, and it could change the way you think about the blues.
The 38-year-old brings a vital passion and mastery to his guitar-playing, honed since he was a precocious boy in Florida, inspired by the powerful style of Albert King. He began playing with the pros at age 13 and, through a combination of obsession and true feeling, has built a reputation as one of the genre’s prime players.
Smith brings his classic blues and his power trio to Anna’s in Honolulu on Thursday, as part of a Hawaii tour that includes appearances Wednesday on Maui, May 18 in Kona and May 19 in Hilo.
THE GUITARIST and singer, well-known by blues lovers worldwide, released his latest album, “Over Your Head,” in 2014. This, his first Hawaii appearance, is in part a scouting trip that might see him appear more frequently in the islands.
His mission in life is to play the blues, he said, and his enthusiasm is evident in conversation.
“To be able to do this for a living at all, to travel the world, is so lucky,” he said. “You’re just trying to do what you love, and the fact that anybody’s willing to come out and spend a few bucks and see you do it is — such a great feeling! And then on top of that you get to go visit all these places — yeah, it’s such a great thing.
“What keeps me going is just — the music in general. There’s nothing else I can do, pretty much, that keeps me as happy as that, besides my family. And yeah, it’s difficult. You’re gone a lot, sometimes you’re losing money, or breaking even. So it is a labor of love.
“But all we need are these little goals, like, one thing gets checked off and you feel like you’ve moved an inch forward on the ruler, and it’s like, ‘Oh man! I sold a record in Japan? You want me to go to Japan? Oh my god.’ And you go to Japan for the first time, and you won’t make any money — maybe you’ll break even — but you’ll have so much fun, and it’s like, even without the money it keeps you going.”
He’s starting to go to Japan relatively often, he said, and hopes that once Hawaii people hear him, they may want him to come back while on his way through.
SMITH DIVIDES his time between live performance and other gigs that capitalize on his prodigious instrumental skills. He spends about half of his working days as a session player, or recording or conducting instructional gigs.
“You have to be incredibly diverse to make a living at this now. So I have to have my finger in so many pies,” he said.
“The way you reach people has changed drastically,” he said. “I’ve been doing this since I was 13 years old. And back then it was playing blues, (touring) in a van. I was a kid playing with adults — and there was no internet, no Youtube, no Facebook, and you had to pound the pavement.
“So even though I’m a young guy, it’s certainly been a new kind of revelation and thing to learn, kind of figuring out how to promote myself on Instagram and on Twitter. … It’s all so new — but it also enables you to have such a longer reach!
“Like, I’ll get messages 20 to 30 times a day from people in places I’ve never been, who want to buy a record, or want to take a guitar lesson from me on Skype — or asking me when I’m coming to Serbia, can they help me create a guitar clinic to get me over there, and book a couple gigs and have me play with a band from over there.
It’s working out for him, he says — but “it’s a slow process.”
“It’s certainly not where I thought it would be, if you would have asked me 20 years ago” (when he was 18), he said.
“I thought I’d be nothing but Josh Smith, blues guitarist, artist, you know what I mean? But if anything, I’m better known now as a guitar player, per se, than a blues artist. It’s interesting the way that works out.”
AS A guitar-obsessed youth, Smith would sometimes practice for 10 hours at a time. Now, he said, his learning experiences tend to crop up as a result of the gigs and sessions he’s part of. He produced a gypsy jazz record recently, for example; and then there were his years touring with R&B artist Raphael Saadiq’s band on and off since 2008.
In connection with his collaborations with Saadiq, Smith has a reputation for his facility with not only blues, but “Motown, soul, R&B, funk, anything rootsy,” he said.
“I do try to make time for practice, but now a lot of the new ideas and concepts that I pick up come from the work that I find myself, the situations I find myself in,” Smith said. “When I’m involved in something, I don’t half-ass it. So that tends to be the kind of thing that pushes my growth nowadays.”
And while his expertise as an instrumentalist gets Smith many a gig, his prime motivation remains with the blues.
“The blues was just the first thing that grabbed me, as a kid,” he said. “It’s still the thing that, no matter what’s going on in my world, when that shuffle or slow blues or B.B. King comes on, it hits something! It stops me dead in my tracks, and I can’t help but react and feel that music.
“With all my influences, everything I listen to and everything I learn, when I bring it in and start making it my own, does it still make other people or make me feel the way I feel when I listen to Otis Rush, or Albert King?
“That’s what I’m trying to do.
“The blues is such a personal music,” Smith said. “You’re saying everything you’re feeling in as little as possible. There’s nothing more direct than the blues.”
