Nate Smith Credit: photo by Tyler Scheerschmidt

This week, Orlando’s Dr. Phillips Center welcomes three-time Grammy-nominated drummer Nate Smith to Judson’s Live. He’ll be performing with keyboardist Kiefer, plus bassists CARRTOONS (May 2) and Butcher Brown’s Andrew Randazzo (May 3 and 4). I recently interviewed Smith — who is currently in the studio recording a follow-up to his 2021 album Kinfolk 2: See the Birds — about his journey from Tidewater Virginia to jamming with giants of jazz and going viral on Instagram, beginning with:

Finding early inspiration from his father’s record collection:

My dad loved music. He especially loved instrumental R&B music of the late ’70s, early ’80s. So artists like Quincy Jones and the Jazz Crusaders, Grover Washington and David Sanborn and that kind of stuff. … I absorbed it from an early age, and I was always fascinated with the rhythms; I was always fascinated with the patterns. When I got old enough to understand it, I noticed that my brother, who was in high school marching band, had a little drum set in our house. He would play a little bit, and I would watch him play, and I would try to mimic what he was doing. And then when he went away to college, I set the drums up myself in the garage. I just wanted to see if I could make them sound like those records I’ve been hearing, if I could do an impersonation of those drummers. That was really the beginning of it.

His early years in marching bands:

I learned a great deal about the fundamentals in marching band, [like] stick technique. The building blocks were really there because we warmed up the same way every day.

The consistency of the routine was really what I took away from marching band, not to mention the reading chops I got from learning those drum solos and memorizing that music. … A lot of that stuff sort of intersected in the marching band world for me.

Getting his big break in college:

I started as a music major [but] I ended up switching [to] mass communications. Back in the day it was basically a place where you could study music in advertising and film, which as it turns out, in the social media age I’ve ended up using a lot of those skills.

The big sort of break for me came my senior year in college, when I met the great jazz singer Betty Carter and she invited me to participate in this residency called Jazz Ahead [at the Kennedy Center]. That was the big eye-opening break for me that changed my trajectory.

Touring Japan with Pat Metheny:

The first time I met Pat, I was actually playing with Chris Potter, the great saxophonist [and] I didn’t even know he was there. He had a baseball cap on, and he was very incognito. But a couple years later, he called me and invited me to come by his apartment and just play, and of course I was honored to do it. We had a great time — we had a ball! — and then he invited me to be a part of this trio called the Side Eye Project.

We did a couple weeks in Japan; we did a monthlong tour [and] it was just a really great time. I really learned a lot about putting a set of music together from Pat. He’s really good at understanding what his audience wants to hear, but also playing stuff that satisfies him musically.

Creating albums with Brittany Howard:

I was obsessing over Sound & Color, the Alabama Shakes record. I was listening to it nonstop, day and night, and out of out of the blue, I got an email from her manager, who said, “Hey man, Brittany would love for you to come out to L.A. and play, do some recording with her.” Of course, I was geeked to do it, so I went out to L.A. This was August of 2018; I got to meet her, I got to meet Sean Everett (who was her producer), and we just recorded for a couple weeks. That became the Jamie album, which came out in September of 2019.

We started touring it — I was her drummer for that first tour — and then, of course, COVID, in February 2020, shut everything down. We didn’t really get a chance to properly tour that record. I know that we were all disappointed to not get to play that music a little more. But as it turned out, we worked together again for her next album, which is called What Now, which came out last year, and we got to tour that all year last year. So we made up for lost time. Brittany is one of the most creative and talented and generous people I’ve ever met. She’s a really beautiful, beautiful person.

Crossing over musical genres:

I come out of the jazz musician tradition/trajectory first; my roots are there, whether it’s straight-ahead jazz or avant-garde jazz or progressive jazz or so-called smooth jazz. It’s all coming out of that world.

I’m a jazz musician first, and everything else is sort of a jazz musician’s approach to that. I do play with rock artists, with hip-hop artists, a lot of different people, but I try to bring my own unique spin on it, and I always try to inject a little bit of improvisation into everything I’m doing.

His approach to song composition:

I like to leave a lot of room for the musicians. I’ll write something that’s very skeletal: maybe just one little horn line, one little melody, and maybe an open solo section. It allows the musicians to take that and run with it. … On the loose-to-structured spectrum, I think I’m fairly on the loose side. But as you play the music, it starts to show you the structure night after night — the structures that create the most possibilities for the musicians.

Bringing jazz to the social media generation:

The most important thing that I’ve learned about using social media to engage is to be really authentic with people. Just give them a vantage point into the process of making music [and be] completely transparent in terms of the process. There’s not a lot of tricks in my social media videos, there’s not a lot of fancy edits. I just play the music and let people see what I’m doing [and] I’m not averse at all to working with younger, up-and-coming musicians, and learning from them as well.

That’s really important; my heroes all have done that. Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, they always worked with younger musicians [and] that’s a mantra for me as well.

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This article appears in Apr 30 – May 6, 2025.