Billboard : 08/05/1957
Score of 70

An appealing slice of the jazz violin work that Smith has long been noted for, but with the sidemen often stealing the limelight. Oscar Peterson, Barney Kessel, Ray Brown, and Alvin Stoller provide top flight accompaniment on such evergreens as Time and Again, It Don’t Mean a Thing, etc. Sales here will be limited only by reason of the ever unique combination of jazz and violin.

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Army Times
Tom Scanlan : 08/03/1957

Violinist Stuff Smith, another leading light of the swing era, has finally been recorded on a new LP. Whatever complaints can be drummed up against Norman Granz, the jazz record king (Clef, Verve, Norgran, etc.), I think we can all be grateful that there is someone like Granz around to record real pros like Stuff, who has been overlooked by the jazz record A&R men for much too long. (Incidentally, Stuff is now on tour with the Granz “JATP” group.)

The opening tune of the set, Ellington‘s It Don’t Mean a Thing If It Ain’t Got That Swing, never stops swinging and in itself is well worth the price of the LP. Among the five other tunes is a pretty ballad by Stuff called Time and Again. Others in the group are guitarist Barney Kessel (in a real Charlie Christian groove, especially on Desert Sands), pianist Oscar Peterson, bassman Ray Brown and drummer Alvin Stoller.

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Kansas City Call
Albert Anderson : 08/02/1957

It is indeed an oddity to find a violinist who swings, but in an album called Stuff Smith, all the ingredients of a swinging violinist are present, plus the talents of four other renown sidemen.

Verve Record company, the author of the track, nailed down the works of Smith, Oscar Peterson (piano); Barney Kessel (guitar); Ray Brown, (bass) and Alvin Stoller (drums) to produce the session that finds Stuff Smith swinging his violin through numbers like Soft Winds, Things Ain’t What They Used To Be, Time and Again and Desert Sands.

How Smith emits the drive and momentum on the violin as he does in this track has been a question mark to many musicians, but this album contains a bevy of swinging and barrelhouse violin moods.

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Oakland Tribune
Russ Wilson : 08/18/1957

Stuff Smith is the album which grew out of the chance sidewalk encounter. Smith appears with pianist Oscar Peterson, guitarist Barney Kessel, bassist Ray Brown, and drummer Alvin Stoller. They play half a dozen tunes, including two of Smith’s originals (Time and Again and Desert Sands) and a pair of Ellington standards (It Don’t Mean a Thing and Things Ain’t What They Used to Be. Smith, who has been termed “the first musician to achieve a real barrelhouse jazz mood on the violin,” demonstrates that he retains his touch, and there is plenty of room for solos by his associates, of which they take happy advantage. It’s a pleasure to have “stuff” back in these surroundings.

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Down Beat : 10/03/1957
Leonard Feather : 5 stars

Smith has been around on records since before most of today’s jazz fans were born. LPs have been around since 1950, yet this is Stuff’s first LP, and if it hadn’t been for Norman Granz, he’d probably still be standing on the corner.

I realize that my giving this record five stars is an empty gesture that will do nothing but raise it to the level of a succès d’estime; I know that after reading the review you will go right out and buy the latest release by your favorite tenor or trumpet man. Nevertheless, if you have ever discussed the meaning of the word swing, ever looked for the incarnation of the beat, you will pass it by when you pass this one up. There is no human being on earth or in heaven who can outswing Stuff Smith.

Because he has with him the Peterson rhythm team (with Kessel in a happy return to his old stomping groove), he swings more than ever in these six fabulous performances. Don’t look for the orthodox violin technique or tone; don’t expect atonal explorations, or borrowings from Bach or Bartók. Look for jazz. Ageless, inhibitionless, faultless jazz that has gassed all his fans from Ellington to Gillespie. From the first note to the last, this LP never touches the ground.

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Liner Notes by Unknown

Stuff Smith! The name itself conjures up many an image – Stuff singing his memorable, hoarse-throated I’se a Muggin’; Stuff playing his swinging violin at the old Onyx Club in New York; Stuff exciting the patrons at the new Composer in New York. Hezekiah Leroy Gordon “Stuff” Smith, in short, is a unique figure in the world of popular music – a violinist who plays with a beat, the first musician, in critic Leonard Feather’s phrase, “to achieve a real barrelhouse jazz mood on the violin.” And if the notion of a swinging yet melodic violin is, somehow, a curious one to you, a hearing of this album should dispel any doubts.

The “palpitating Paganini,” as Smith was once called by a critic, is also a singer with rather a hoarse but nonetheless appealing voice along with being a composer of no mean talent. In fact, two of his selections – Time and Again and Desert Sands – are included in this album; among the other tunes are a pair by Duke Ellington (Smith being an ardent fan of his music), not to mention a song of Vincent Youmans‘ from a Broadway show of 1926 now all but forgotten – the show is “Oh, Please!” but the song is an evergreen, I Know That You Know.

Stuff Smith was born Sept. 14, 1909 in Portsmouth, OH, into a musical family. His father, a barber by trade, was a violinist, his mother a pianist. From his father Stuff learned the fundamentals of the instrument, starting from the time he was 6. By the time he was 9 Stuff was taking lessons from a Prof. Damon in Akron, intending to be a classical violinist. At 10, he was playing in his father’s dance band. Five years later Stuff was attending Johnson C. Smith University in Charlotte, NC, on a music scholarship, and there he heard a record of Louis Armstrong playing Savoy Blues. As Stuff says today, “That did it!” He turned to popular music, strongly under the Armstrong influence. It was about then that he gained his nickname. He had joined a touring musical show. “There were so many people in the troupe I didn’t know all their names, so I called everybody ‘Stuff’. Soon everyone called ME “Stuff” – and it stuck.”

For a time Smith worked with the Alphonse Trent orchestra around Dallas, TX, before venturing up to the Buffalo area where he led his own band. By now the Swing Era was erupting and soon Stuff Smith was one of its more conspicuous heroes – a violinist who could swing. These were the days of the Onyx Club, as noted previously, on New York’s W. 52nd St. Wilder Hobson, an informal historian of the period, recalls that the Onyx was just another second-floor speakeasy during Prohibition except that its clientele consisted largely of dance and radio musicians and that the entertainment was intended primarily to please them – in a word, the music had best be good. After Repeal the Onyx moved downstairs and across the street but the tradition of good music continued and it was the Onyx that Stuff first bolted to fame with his amplified violin, the first, incidentally, ever to apply electronics to this venerable instrument.

Smith has been playing with his own trio ever since, touching any number of bases – setting a record for length of engagement at Chicago’s La Salle Hotel, drawing crowds to the Metropole and the Composer in New York, to the Keyhole Club in Los Angeles, and to any number of other clubs. If it seems unusual for anyone to play an amplified violin in the first place (Smith’s own Guarnerius, it might be added, is valued at $5,000), Stuff Smith is one musician who has broken rules from the outset. He employs an unorthodox fingering style, for one thing. Moreover, he bows – in his own words – “as though the violin were a trumpet, meaning with plenty of drive.” Smith has this advice to offer embryonic swing violinists: “Play in tune. Don’t be afraid to attack flatted fifths. And, play from the heart, always.”