Paul Ely Smith: Home

Fall 2011

Thanks for visiting!

If you want to follow what I've been up to, my suggestion is that you click the flash player below and start listening to some music, and then go to links and click the blog link. That's where I post the news. Some of it is also about Palouse prairie restoration, which is another part of what I'm doing here.

Recent posts have been about my design and construction of a prototype of a new fretless gourd banjo, a redesign of the instrument that builds on features of the banjo's earliest West African ancestors.

I had started recording some music for gourd banjo, and I have posted a track from that effort, "Cluck Old Hen," in the music section or by using the flash player at the bottom of this page. You can both see and hear this instrument in the "links" page, where I play my version of Gottschalk's "The Banjo" on this instrument. I love the sound of this banjo, but I needed something with a more powerful voice, and so I have paused that project while I build the new instrument. It's not like you can just run down to the music store for something like this.

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. 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. Richard Kriehn's CD is finally released; I think you can get it on cdbaby. In the meantime you can hear him most weeks on Prairie Home Companion.

I also posted a few tracks 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.

Paul Ely Smith

musician, composer, performer, producer, instrument builder