The bassoon seems to be the homebody of the orchestral woodwind family. This double-reed dynamo rarely leaves the confines of the classical world, instead finding contentment in its comfort zone, ...

If you’d asked me a few days ago, I would have said, “In fact, there is no such thing as a great jazz bassoonist.” No one today, I would have said, is meaningfully and beautifully playing the bassoon ...

Daniel Smith's "Bassoon and Beyond" Jazz Quartet plays Fri., Sep. 23 & Sat., Sep. 24 at Twins Jazz for 9pm & 11pm sets. The leading pioneer of the bassoon with his many critically acclaimed ...

Unusual instrumentation within jazz is not exactly unusual. A lot of “weird” and unexpected combinations of instruments have been heard, and thankfully so. There are abundant examples of ...

Bassoon player and bandleader Daniel Smith cooks up a heady mix of blues and bop with a dash of experimental jazz in his recording, Blue Bassoon from Summit Records. Similarly to his previous albums ...

It's about that sound—that down there, frog-like bellowing encountered on cartoon soundtracks, novelty TV commercials, and that marvelously masculine sound heard in the greatest of orchestral and ...

Give Daniel Smith points for persistence. He doesn’t give up easily. His mission to convince us that the bassoon is a bona fide instrument of jazz has gone on for four albums now. There was The ...