Musician, keyboard player, and songwriter, Eliot King Smith has led a rich musical life. He began his musical career at an early age, taught by his concert pianist parents on the two grand pianos in their living room. Groomed to be a classical pianist, Eliot’s discovery of B.B King and Aretha Franklin recordings when he was twelve, led to a dramatic change of direction.
Just out of high school, Eliot started playing in rock bands in the 1970s in London. He returned to the US in time to be a part of the vibrant East Bay music scene in Oakland California, where bands like Santana, Tower of Power, and Sly Stone, were mixing funk styles with hopped up horn bands and roots music. During the end of the disco era, Eliot teamed up with Bruce Conte (former guitarist with Tower of Power) to play in Hot Street, and later Powerplay.
Steeped in blues and funk, Eliot stopped touring in the mid 1980s. He returned to college and eventually earned a PhD. in American Studies, with a focus on popular music. During that span of time, he wrote music for documentary film collaborating with Ozzie Jones Jr. in the scoring and performance of “Lift Every Voice: John Preston Davis and the National Negro Congress.”
After teaching history for several decades, Eliot moved to France to return to his first love; writing, singing and recording original music. It was in France, in 2020, that the project “Short Life, Small Planet” began right at the beginning of the Covid pandemic. The resulting eleven songs went from preproduction to final mixing in two countries, 4 states and 5 studios! Pandemic logistics made it a truly heroic and international effort, not to mention a funky fusion of blues, jazz, soul and rock. Eliot now spends his time between a little town in the middle of vineyards in Provence and Portland, Maine.
