Sunday
If Eli Smart’s music sounds hard to pin down then that’s because it comes from two very different places. And not two different places in the abstract, metaphorical sense. But literally two very different places.
Smart grew up on the island of Kauai, Hawaii in a family of musicians. His maternal grandmother was in one of LA’s first ever all female rock groups and opened for Jimi Hendrix, while his grandfather was a jazz composer who worked with Duke Ellington. Smart’s father is also a jazz musician and his parents run a ukulele story on Kauai. Music then, was unsurprisingly a constant presence in Smart’s life; records by The Beatles, Gladys Knight, Prince and Beck drifting through the house and feeding into his musical DNA, almost by osmosis.