A Jazz Affair

Sylvester “Smitty” Smith once walked miles from near downtown to The Broadmoor just to see Nat “King” Cole emerge from his car and walk into the hotel for a show. A security guard let the young Smith and his buddies hide quietly and observe. Smith called it the best day of his life.

He saw Dizzy Gillespie play at the Fine Arts Center, Count Basie and Lionel Hampton at the Rainbow Ballroom in Denver and Weldon Leo “Jack” Teagarden at Elitch’s Garden Ballroom in Denver.

The list goes on: Frank Sinatra in Las Vegas, Art Tatum and Errol Garner in New York City.

Smith is a 78-year-old jazz aficionado. He’s also been a part-time security guard at the Fine Arts Center for 22 years. The current exhibit at the FAC Modern, “Portraits From the Golden Age of Jazz,” opened the floodgates of his memory.

“I’ve seen everybody in that room but two of them,” Smith said on the exhibit’s opening night.

William P. Gottlieb’s black-and-white photos of famous musicians line the walls of the gallery, and Smith can conjure up a story or historical fact about almost all of them.

Smith was born and raised in Colorado Springs and graduated from Colorado Springs High School (now Palmer High School) in 1947, before joining the Army. During high school, he played semiprofessional baseball for the Brown Bombers. The team was made up of black players and competed in the allwhite baseball league in the late 1940s and early 1950s. He’s been married since he was 17, and his daughter — strictly a “blues fan” — lives in St. Louis.

Music was an early passion. When he was an adolescent, his mother could afford to buy him three years of piano lessons, priced at about 25 to 50 cents each, he said. Later, he sang in a Baptist church. All along, jazz music “just grew on me,” he said, but he never pursued being a musician beyond his lessons and time in the church choir.

In high school, he ran with an older crowd that shared his interest in jazz. He tells a story that underscores their dedication to the art form:

They wanted to go to Denver for a Count Basie show, so they tied five or six spare tires onto a car and left Colorado Springs in the early morning, heading north on a gravel road that would later become Interstate 25. Threequarters of a mile out, one tire blew. They pulled over, changed it and kept chugging along, only to keep blowing, patching and changing tires all the way to Denver. They made it just in time.

In his mid-20s, Smith and two other local men formed the Big 3 Agency, and for almost five years, they booked blues acts at places such as Peterson Field and clubs along Nevada Avenue. At one point, he collaborated with Fannie Mae Duncan, the owner of a then-famous local nightspot, the Cotton Club.

Smith was also in the midst of a major cultural shift: integration. Two of his pastimes — baseball and jazz — opened the door to integration. Jazz began to move toward it in the ’30s, beating by decades the civil rights movement of the ’60s. In fact, he recalls that Benny Goodman was the first major jazz player to allow blacks in his band.

“He took a lot of flak,” said Smith.

But he downplays the scene’s political correctness. The band leaders simply wanted to bring in the best musicians, he said.

The past few months of the Modern’s exhibit has been unusually busy for Smith. Once his secret love affair with jazz became public knowledge, he became a part of the exhibit.

“I do know he has a love-hate relationship with this new attention,” said Charlie Snyder, director of the Fine Arts Center’s public relations. “He pretends to not like it, but inside I think he appreciates the attention, and the attention not just to him but to the artists he loves so much.”

CONTACT THE WRITER: 636-0277 or jen.mulson@gazette.com