HARRY ALLEN & FRASER SMITH

TWO TENORS. ONE TRADITION. ONE EXTRAORDINARY NIGHT.

Somewhere between 52nd Street, 1950s Blue Note, smoky Soho basements and a tiny jazz room in Lancashire, two tenor saxophones are about to meet. On Saturday 16th January 2027, Barnoldswick Music & Arts Centre welcomes two remarkable musicians from opposite sides of the Atlantic when American tenor giant Harry Allen joins Britain's Fraser Smith and his superb quartet for what promises to be one of those rare nights when jazz history, musicianship and sheer instinct collide.

There is a beautiful symmetry to putting Harry Allen and Fraser Smith on the same stage. They come from different generations and different sides of the ocean, yet they appear to share the same musical bloodstream. Both understand the seductive power of a great tenor sound. Both believe in melody, space and time. Both know that technical brilliance means very little unless the music actually says something. And, perhaps most importantly of all, both believe that jazz should swing.

Harry Allen stands firmly inside one of the great bloodlines of American jazz — the lineage of Lester Young, Coleman Hawkins, Ben Webster, Stan Getz, Zoot Sims and Al Cohn. He doesn't impersonate those musicians; he speaks the language they helped create. His sound can be warm and breathy one moment, muscular and blues-soaked the next, but underneath everything sits an effortless sense of time. The late jazz writer Gene Lees once recalled Stan Getz being asked to imagine the perfect tenor saxophonist. Getz's answer was: "My technique, Al Cohn's ideas, and Zoot's time." Lees' conclusion was irresistible: "The fulfillment of that ideal may well be embodied in... Harry Allen."

Born in Washington D.C. in 1966 and raised in California and Rhode Island, Allen grew up surrounded by the sounds of Duke Ellington, Count Basie and Benny Goodman. His father had been a drummer during the big-band era, and those records seeped into Harry's musical DNA. Discovering Rhode Island tenor great Scott Hamilton provided another crucial piece of the puzzle, while Ben Webster and Stan Getz became particularly important influences. Allen eventually emerged not as some reverential keeper of a museum piece, but as one of the musicians capable of making that great tenor tradition feel completely natural in the present day.

The career that followed is extraordinary. Allen has made more than 70 albums as a leader, appeared on countless others, won three Gold Disc Awards from Japan's influential Swing Journal and worked alongside musicians including Ray Brown, Hank Jones, Kenny Burrell, Rosemary Clooney, Scott Hamilton, John Pizzarelli and Bucky Pizzarelli. The Harry Allen–Joe Cohn Quartet received the 2006 New York Nightlife Award for Outstanding Jazz Combo Performance, Allen himself received the 2010 award for Best Jazz Solo, and in 2024 he was inducted into the Rhode Island Music Hall of Fame.

Yet put the awards and discographies to one side and Harry Allen's appeal becomes beautifully simple. He makes the tenor saxophone sound gorgeous. He can swing ferociously, whisper through a ballad or simply sit inside a melody and allow it to breathe. There is no desperation to impress you with how clever the music is. The sophistication is already there. Allen understands something the greatest players have always understood: sometimes one beautifully placed note can say considerably more than fifty.

And then, from this side of the Atlantic, comes Fraser Smith.

Born in Birmingham and raised between the Midlands and Wales, Smith discovered jazz as a teenager through the music of Charlie Parker, Louis Armstrong and Ike Quebec. What began with records found almost accidentally became an obsession. Smith studied the solos, the phrasing, the vocabulary and — crucially — the sound. He describes himself as a "practical scholar", and it might be the perfect description of his approach. Fraser hasn't simply studied the history of jazz. He has absorbed it until the language has become his own.

Since moving to London in 2010, Smith has developed into one of Britain's busiest straight-ahead jazz musicians, playing hundreds of performances a year and appearing at venues including Ronnie Scott's, PizzaExpress Live, the Southbank Centre, The Vortex, Snape Maltings and Edinburgh's Jazz Bar, with festival appearances taking him from Britain to Bahrain, Guadalajara and Beijing. His musical compass points towards players including Ike Quebec, Dexter Gordon, Hank Mobley, Stanley Turrentine, Illinois Jacquet and Wardell Gray — another glorious branch of that same tenor saxophone family tree.

With Rob Barron on piano, Simon Read on double bass and Steve Brown on drums, Fraser has assembled a quartet capable of doing something deceptively difficult: making sophisticated jazz feel exciting, immediate and completely effortless. Their acclaimed 2023 album Tip Top! arrived on Ubuntu Music loaded with swing, bebop, hard bop and soul-jazz attitude. John Fordham described the music as "nonchalantly confident and very hard-swinging," while Jazzwise identified Smith as "a talent to watch." The quartet followed it with 2025's Lifeline!, earning four-star reviews from both The Times and Jazzwise and further establishing Smith as a musician for whom the jazz tradition is not a destination but a launching pad.

And that's where this particular night becomes fascinating, because Harry Allen and Fraser Smith aren't opposites being brought together for novelty value. They're musical relatives who haven't grown up in the same house.

Allen brings Getz, Webster, Zoot and Al Cohn into the room. Smith carries echoes of Dexter, Quebec, Mobley and Turrentine. Somewhere in between lies an enormous shared territory of blues, bebop, ballads, standards, swing and that indefinable thing jazz musicians simply call time.

Imagine the possibilities when the two tenors finally stand alongside one another. Harry plays a phrase. Fraser answers it. Fraser pushes. Harry smiles and throws something back. Behind them Barron finds another chord, Read's bass begins walking and Brown catches the whole thing on the ride cymbal. Suddenly there are no generations, no Americans and Brits, no 1950s and 2020s.

There are simply five musicians in a room having a conversation.

That's jazz.

And that is precisely why Barnoldswick Music & Arts Centre feels made for this concert. This music doesn't require a cavernous auditorium or a distant stage. It needs intimacy. You want to be close enough to hear the air moving through those tenor saxophones, the fingers against the double bass strings, the tiny conversations between piano and drums and, occasionally, that split second of silence when one musician has played something so good that everybody else instinctively leaves it hanging in the air.

This isn't a nostalgia show. Nobody is dressing up as 1957. This is continuation — two superb tenor saxophonists taking a musical language stretching back generations and proving that it remains capable of excitement, romance, humour, danger and surprise.

So forget what year it is for a couple of hours. Turn the lights down. Imagine the bass walking. Hear the cymbal begin to shimmer. Then picture Harry Allen and Fraser Smith, tenors raised, standing barely feet away from the audience.

New York meets London. Getz meets Dexter. Webster meets Quebec. Zoot meets Mobley.

And for one winter night, somewhere between Manhattan, Soho and the Lancashire hills...

Barnoldswick becomes 52nd Street.

HARRY ALLEN & THE FRASER SMITH QUARTET
Featuring Harry Allen & Fraser Smith — Tenor Saxophones, Rob Barron — Piano, Simon Read — Double Bass and Steve Brown — Drums.

Saturday 16th January 2027 — Barnoldswick Music & Arts Centre — Doors 7.00pm — Tickets £30.00.

Two tenor saxophones. Five world-class musicians. One intimate room. And generations of jazz passing between them.