Taylor Smith & The Roamin' Jasmine

New Orleans-originated & Southern roots-music-inspired band, now based in the Twin Cities, Taylor Smith & The Roamin' Jasmine are here to move your feet and delight your ears. Bandleader-vocalist-upright-bassist Taylor Smith’s original songs & arrangements draw from the deep well of musical traditions that grew out of the American South and beyond featuring rejuvenated renditions of 1920's country blues, 1950's New Orleans R&B, roots Calypso from Trinidad, 1930's swing, and even some 1950's Country tunes—all tightly arranged for a multiple-horns & rhythm section band to complement his soulful, slightly bourbon-tinged tenor vocals.

Freshly graduated from the University of Miami’s Frost School of Music, Smith moved to New Orleans in 2010 where, for the first time, he got to experience live many of the sounds he had only previously heard on scratchy old 78 rpm records. Inspired by the city’s history of ethnic and musical diversity, and by the vitality and enthusiasm he encountered for this “old-timey” music in his new home-base, he began to compile some of his favorite vintage repertoire and polish them up with a modern elegance and youthful energy without losing that raw edginess that drew him to the music in the first place. At the same time, he began composing his own songs that complemented the wide variety of traditional tunes he heard around town. Arranging this collection for a six-piece jazz ensemble, he decided to recruit like-minded colleagues and bring his work to the streets of New Orleans, where he and many of the band’s rotating cast of players cut their teeth busking amongst closed storefronts on the sidewalks of the French Quarter at night.

Since then, he has led various incarnations of the band from their home base in the Crescent City to tiny pubs in historic towns across the UK, Swing dance clubs in East Germany and even to perform for a screaming crowd crammed into an old converted airplane hangar in Fairbanks, Alaska, venues filled to the brim with dancers hungry for more. The band’s performances have won them media praises in a multitude of far flung locales. They appeared twice on the BBC Radio in England, and in Edinburgh, Scotland, jazz journalist Rob Adams writes:

"This is music to remind you that the New Orleans tradition is still very much alive and that even the most grizzled of Crescent City tunes, with their origins spread all over the Deep South and the Caribbean, can be reinvigorated to have both the character that comes with age and the effervescence of youth.”

Music editor Alli Marshall of Mountain Xpress in Asheville, North Carolina comments:

"The band performed as if their horns and strings were on fire…Lead singer Taylor Smith’s voice sounds like it’s been dragged through a blackberry patch, at once thorny and sweet."

With six tours of the UK & Europe under their belt including two performances at the Maverick Festival, one epic tour of Alaska, two years in a row of appearances at the LEAF Festival in Black Mountain, NC, a 2017 tour through Australia where they were featured performers at the Dashville Skyline Festival, performances at the 2019 Anchorage Folk Festival and New Orleans French Quarter Festival, a Fall 2021 California tour, Summer 2022 performances in France and Denmark, including at the Copenhagen Jazz Festival, the band shows no signs of stopping their roamin' around the planet anytime soon.

On Mardi Gras Day 2020, Taylor recorded a 5-song EP at the historic American Recording Studios in Memphis, Tennessee, the first in a series of recordings to be titled Mississippi Delta Dreaming, which will explore the musical styles of various regions connected by the Mississippi River. These new recordings feature a top-notch crew of Memphis musicians assembled by Ori Naftaly, bandleader of the Grammy-nominated Memphis blues band, Southern Avenue, who served as producer for the recordings. While the pandemic put the release of this new EP on hold, along with the planned May 2020 European tour that was to feature a collaboration with two incredibly talented members of the Italian boogie-woogie trio Black Ball Boogie, the new EP was finally released in a limited-edition, DIY-printed fashion in September 2021, just in time for the band’s first West Coast tour. Look out for a second CD pressing of that EP, this time from a professional duplication service, coming 2023.
With three tours of the Europe under their belt including two performances at the Maverick Festival, one epic tour of Alaska, two years in a row of appearances at the LEAF Festival in Black Mountain, NC, plus a recent tour through Australia where they were featured performers at the Dashville Skyline Festival, they show no signs of letting up on roamin' around the planet in 2018. Stay tuned for upcoming tour details, and news of collaborative works with Australian singer-songwriter Lachlan Bryan, and Louisiana locals to be announced.