Paul Ely Smith: Home

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I have started chipping away on a recording of music for fretless gourd banjo, and I have just posted the first finished track, "Cluck Old Hen," in the music section, which you can hear it by clicking on "music" on the right side of this page, or by using the flash player at the bottom of this page.

In the last few years I've been producing CDs for other people too, and I have decided to post examples of some of those productions. The most recent tracks are by Tiana Gregg and Richard Kriehn, and they can be heard in their entirety in the "music" section, and they are tracks #2 and #3 on the flash player, below. In addition, there are a bunch of older tracks from a variety of CDs on the "music" page, all sorts of things we've been recording out here. Several tracks from my most recent CDs, "Mosaic" and "Handmade" are posted as well.

I also posted a few things in the "music" section that were never released, beginning with a recording I made in 2005 of my "Wind Quintet," performed by the WSU Solstice Woodwind Quintet, and a live recording of "Canntaireachd" for choir, a piece I composed in 1990.

In other exciting news, I have started a blog, which you can get to by clicking on "links" on the right, and I recently posted an article I published 'way back in 1992 on the 19th-century roots of the banjo in the "press" section. Now I really have to get do work on that gourd banjo CD...

Paul Ely Smith

musician, composer, performer, producer, instrument builder