The fourth album by the Paul Smoker Trio.

Track 1: The Call (Haynes)
Track 2: Old Time Southside Street Dance (Joseph Jarman)
Track 3: Chorale and Descendance (Smoker)
Track 4: Come Rain or Come Shine (Johnny Mercer/Harold Arlen)

(Paid downloads include the tracks "Old Time Southside Street Dance" (Joseph Jarman) and "Come Rain or Come Shine" (Harold Arlen/Johnny Mercer) in addition to the two originals.)

Liner notes by Kevin Whitehead:

Iowa-born, Smoker's trio comes at you like a tornado out of the plains - it pounds plenty, but sneaks up on you. Both sides of Come Rain or Come Shine begin at a whisper, erupting out of the quiet. For all the cyclonics once they get rolling, Rohovit, Haynes and Smoker appreciate space and silence. Each side of the album, moving from the calm to the explosive, is a longterm focusing and ordering of collective energy: entropy in reverse.

On first hearing. Paul Smoker's trumpet sounds giddily ragged - Don Cherry spoofing Maynard Ferguson. Later, his secret passion for order reveals itself. Paul Smoker hears the big patterns-patterns larger than any one performance, or the fashions of a decade, or the conventions of polite harmony. His philosophy as trumpeter and as bandleader are the same: Jazz is a great tradition in all its aspects, so why not avail yourself of the whole gamut?

Steve Lacy once told me Jazz is »a beautiful river you could just swim in. provided you have the right focus and the right ideals«. With a repertoire that spans W.C. Handy, David Raskin, Mingus and Joseph Jarman, Smoker's crew take Jazz up the river, down the alley and around the Loop. (The urban charge »Old Time Southside Street Dance«, by the Art Ensemble of Chicago's Jarman, pays tribute to a parallel Midwestern ancient-to-the-future approach).

You can look at Smoker, Rohovit and Haynes as neo-traditionalists, assessing the inexhaustible richness of the music's past. Smoker is more a melodic than harmonic improviser, harking back to the bravura variations of Armstrong, an early role model. Smoker ties together '20s talking brass with 60s textural abstractions. All three players recognize the links between collective free play and New Orleans polyphony.

Neo-trad the band may be; neo-conservative it ain't. They don't limit themselves to tidy mainstreaming - and their eclecticism bypasses the cooly ironic posturing of postmodernism. It's too passionate for mere pastiche.

Phil Haynes, who wrote »The Call«, has left the trio's lowa home for New York: besides working with this trio and with Smoker in the quartet Joint Venture, he leads his own quintet Four Horns and What? Haynes has never been a laidback drummer, a conspicuous asset. But more and more lately, his improvising suggests a composer's structural and orchestral sense. Check out his thematic solo at the climax of Paul's »Chorale and Descendance« (later cut by Joint Venture, by the way).

I'm particularly taken with Ron Rohovit's basswork here - his speechlike pizzicato, and his aggressive bowing. (Note the enviably instant responsiveness of his strings.) On »The Call« his germinal six-note phrase never becomes mechanical, never stops breathing. He's at the core of the band's rubbery flexibility. If Haynes displaces a beat in a phrase here, Smoker races through a theme there, or Rohovit bends tonality someplace else - or if all three happen at once - that's okay. They know that tradition is elastic - if you stretch it, it's not gonna break.

The trio's frayed but decidedly swinging take on Harold Arlen's Johnny Mercer's »Come Rain or Come Shine« is a case in point. It begins with the trumpeter's solo cadenza. If his reading seems irreverent - raspberries, half-valving, lip-vibrato and what sound like spit-valve manipulations - remember that Arlen's father, a cantor, used to weave his son's melodies into his improvisations at the synagogue.

One reason they infuse this song with such fire may be that it speaks to the band's experience. Arlen's mournful melody and Johnny Mercer's steadfast lyric acknowledge, how hard it is to be true to who (or what) really matters. It can't be easy maintaining a trio whose members are scattered over half a continent, who've toughed it out through thin and thin. I suspect these three musicians keep at it because they know that as the music grows in strength and momentum, it attracts more and more attention. Like a tornado over the plains. (Kevin Whitehead, January 1989)

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“I always find myself smiling while listening to the Paul Smoker Trio, but not because it’s funny. While it’s true that there’s humor there, most of the time I’m grinning at sheer inventiveness.

“Come Rain or Come Shine” … opens with drummer Phil Haynes’s ‘The Call.’ A quiet, dense bass and drum conversation gives ground to the slow emergence of the call from trumpeter Smoker, bringing to mind a sort of free jazz take on Ives’ “The Unanswered Question.” Suddenly a quiet fanfare is sounded above an odd-metered obstinate, and here I am, smiling, wondering where did that come from?

“…Smoker’s ‘Chorale and Descendance’ showcases a stately chorale giving way to bassist Ron Rohovit’s enviable solo chops. The quirky groove toward the end tugs at the corners of my mouth.

“Among the disparate images Smoker evokes in his inventive cadenza introduction to the title tune are bleating elephants and traffic-report helicopters. In the space of a micro-second an upper-limits shriek becomes a low, buzzing pedal tone. Rohovit and Haynes join in and suddenly these guys are playing changes—changes that slowly veer off-course, like an airliner with a faulty autopilot. And I’ll admit it: I’m grinning and nodding my head.

“The Paul Smoker Trio creates music of depth and substance, meaningful music that reveals more with each repeated listening. Come Rain or Come Shine is a fine album.” — Kelly Bucheger in Arts Midwest Jazz Letter, Winter 1990

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“Smoker and company now have a string of first-rate recordings. They should no longer be considered a great Iowa band or even a great Midwestern band. They are now a world-class trio.” — Krin Gabbard, Cadence, February 1990

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In what some writers have now been describing as the "mainstream free jazz tradition," a recent release by trumpeter Smoker (Come Rain or Come Shine - Sound Aspects CD 024 46:32) is an example befitting of that expression. With drummer Phil Haynes and bassist Ron Rohovit in tow, the personnel is quite typical of the genre. Three long cuts plus a small three minute interlude fill up the side, all of which are loose interpretations built on thematical sketches, so to speak. The leader's broad tone and strong sense of projection as a soloist amply justify his name while his associates do not slavishly "accompany" in the traditional time-keeping sense. But, at the heart of it, this is still a rhythm section plus horn session, one where the brassman definitely carries a good part of the music by creating a wide variety of moods and textures. Incidentally, the title cut is indeed the Harold Arlen tune, but its treatment is highly abstracted, thus becoming a very open exploration on the evocative nature of the title rather than on its specific harmonic structure or melodic content.
Marc Chénard, in Coda Magazine, February/March 1991