Driftwood by Matt Smith

'Memory is the diary we all carry about with us.' Oscar Wilde

Memories, like diaries, are slippery things. They're easily mistaken as some sort of record. A day, a moment, a feeling, rushes from experience into a caught, splayed out thing, pins through its limbs. We collect and place thousands of these, and as they wind off into the darkness their truth becomes easy to trust, easy to read as inventory, an equation whose output is 'me'. But this elides memory and diary's selectiveness. An artist friend of mine once titled a tune 'We Are All Museums Of Fear', and while we might argue over the choice of emotion, it is hard to deny memory's curatorial bent. It is not some fixed series that, amino-acid-like, coils into a person, but rather a consistently refocusing survival impulse. Sometimes a defensive measure; 'I am not an unreasonable person, therefore that memory of being unreasonable must be inaccurate.' More often, though, memory is an act of self-recrimination; you feel guilty for something - here, enjoy this carousel of two dozen similar times that suggest the current feeling is inexorable. ‘Maybe you're just someone who does things they should be ashamed of’. The winding queue of memories shifts, and next time the guilt will become even more automatic, given more tactile form by its repetition. Memory is often a mechanism which manifests our deepest suspicions about ourselves.


Perhaps then it is the act of remembering, not what is remembered, that's the point. As a young person I was obsessed with the work of saxophonist Charlie Parker, memorizing dozens of his solos, and while I can't say that process got me any closer to sounding like Charlie Parker, I do know it got me closer to sounding like myself. Rather than worry about memory's inherent fluidity, we could develop our practice of engaging with it and trusting the results of that effort. As John Hospers writes, 'art...is not a reproduction of reality; it is a transformation of reality', and one of jazz music's most important elements, improvisation, is in itself a collective process of remembering and transforming. The players draw from their individual experience with the tune, the style, their lives, and then combine to create a new singular expression from these parts. Perhaps this is how memory can be trusted - as fuel for renewal, of ourselves, our art, our modes of being.


Matt Smith's 'Driftwood' has memory in its every particle. It is a suite of tunes written as an exploration of his youth spent exploring the Western Australian coast, and the fallibility of the memories that survived those times. The record is paired with a series of landscape photographs, and their smeared, hazy composition complements and illustrates the music Smith and his ensemble create. It's hard, for example, to hear the swooping trumpet on 'Sugarloaf' as resembling anything but a gull cresting the winds around the titular granite island; 'Harbour's groaning horns and roiling drums are an almost one-to-one depiction of a fishing boat's grateful return to port from an angry sea. But this suggests an almost programmatic quality to the music, when the listening experience of it is knottier, murkier, full of all of the mess of a human mind in recollection.

In this context, the ensemble's improvising could be read as contrasting or even contradictory takes of these recollections. As 'Gracetown' builds to its climax, the horns writhe and twist against one another before merging into a final unison statement of the melody, as if a memory were described from multiple viewpoints until ultimately, against all odds, cohering. The trumpet solo on ‘Forest Photo’ takes place in a bright, colourful world, but later Sean Little’s tenor emerges into a darker, colder place. Are these two separate moments in the same afternoon, or two different experiences of the same moment? ‘Trio’ has the feeling of an anecdote collectively told by three friends, at times falling over each other to emphasize a point until one voice claims the spotlight for a time.

By putting this record into the world, Smith and his band offer the opportunity to engage with these ideas in the same way as the artists have. It doesn’t ultimately matter if these compositions suggest to the listener the same landscapes from which Smith drew inspiration, a place and time known only to the individual, or entirely imagined experiences - the winding queue of memories continues on. The diary is curated. An artist can only offer a short opportunity for transformation, whether of ourselves or of reality. Memory is a poor medium for building a life, but in the absence of a better option - let us renew ourselves and trust the result of that effort.

- Dylan Hooper



Throughout my life I have spent a lot of it ‘down south’ in the Southwest Region of Western Australia. There were many formative experiences such as trips to the beach, skateboarding, surfing and of course listening to music while driving through some of the most stunning landscapes on the planet. While writing the music for this album, I was trying to capture a very real sense of the places I had grown up around. The sounds, smells, the wind and rain, stillness, turbulence of the coastline all come thru in different ways in the compositions and the playing.

Endless thanks and praise must go to the band: Marc, Sean, Dan G, Austin, Alistair and Dan H. You all are incredible musicians and friends.

Thanks to Kieran Kenderessy for his support, generosity and skilled craftsmanship in recording and mixing the record.

Driftwood - Matt Smith

Matt Smith - Trumpet & Flugelhorn
Marc Osborne - Alto and Tenor Saxophone
Sean Little - Tenor Saxophone
Dan Garner - Guitar
Austin Salisbury - Piano
Alistair Peel - Double Bass
Daniel Harrison - Drums

Recorded on 17th & 18th June, 2023 at Loop Studios

Ninjaneered by Kieran Kenderessy

Mastered at King Willy sound by William Bowden

Album Design by Annie Mitchell

Photos by Matt Smith

This album came about thanks to the support of the 2023 PJS Album Grant. Thanks to the Judges: Andrea Keller, Sam Anning and Katie Noonan.

Thank you for buying this record.

Matt Smith is a trumpeter/composer from Perth, Western Australia.