Hale Smith

Hale Smith Jr. was born on the twenty-ninth of June 1925 at Cleveland, Ohio, the son of Hale Smith Sr. — a porter on the Pennsylvania Railroad — and Jimmie Olivia Brown Smith. He was raised in the Glenville neighbourhood of Cleveland and educated at the Cleveland public schools through the East Technical High School.

He served the United States Army in 1944 and 1945 in the segregated 92nd Infantry Division at the Italian campaign of the closing year of the European war, returning to Cleveland in 1946.

He enrolled in 1946 at the Cleveland Institute of Music on the G.I. Bill in composition under Marcel Dick, completing the Bachelor of Music in 1950 and the Master of Music in 1952. He met during the Cleveland Institute years the jazz pianist Tadd Dameron, who introduced him to the New York jazz arrangement and composition economy.

He moved to New York in 1958 and took employment as a music editor at the Edward B. Marks Music Corporation, the C. F. Peters Corporation, and the Sam Fox Music Publishers across the following twelve years — across which he edited the published scores of dozens of senior American composers including Duke Ellington (placed in this archive), Aaron Copland, and Roger Sessions.

He arranged across the same decade for the Duke Ellington and Dizzy Gillespie (placed in this archive) orchestras and for the singers Eric Dolphy and Abbey Lincoln.

He completed in 1962 the orchestral work Contours, premiered by the Louisville Orchestra under Robert Whitney on the eighteenth of December 1962 — a twelve-tone work integrating the harmonic vocabulary of post-Webern serialism with the rhythmic articulation of bebop.

He was appointed in 1970 to the music faculty of the University of Connecticut at Storrs, the position he held until his retirement in 1984.

He composed across the following thirty years over forty works — among them the orchestral Ritual and Incantations (1974), the wind ensemble work Innerflexions (1977), and the chamber work Meditations in Passage (1980).

He died at Freeport, New York on the twenty-fourth of November 2009, at eighty-four.

He is honored here as a principal editor of the American jazz and concert literatures.