Remember the Unifour Jazz Ensemble, the eighteen-piece swing band that entertained audiences around the world, throughout the 1980's? Well, they are back. But not without undergoing a journey that could be set in the pages of a Machavellian novel or on the celluoid of a made for television movie. It can best be said that this is not your typical big band revival.

From 1984 to 1991, the group that originally started as a small-town community project was one of the most respected jazz ensembles of its kind. During its's existence, it won every award and accolade a group of its kind could receive.

In 1987, Unifour broke out in a big way when it became the first winner of the Downbeat magazine "Musicfest USA" competition; the most prestigious contest in all of jazz music. To the amazement of more than a few people, a small, little-known geographic region in the North Carolina foothills shared its name with one of the elite American jazz ensembles.

Ironically, the band's disappearance was as fast and unexplainable as its ascension. In the opinion of its workaholic and often mecurial leader, Tom Smith, it was due to a number of factors. Most significantly, according to Smith, it was a matter of too much, too soon.

"We just didn't have the support base to keep alive what we had built," said Smith." I didn't do a good enough job of convincing arts organizations in our area that we were a better product than they believed. We were better known in Europe than we were in Hickory! Then, of course, there was the petty stuff."

Smith is referring to the celebrated battles he engaged in with bueracrats and musicians who did not see Unifour's rise as justified or genuine. In 1988, he surprised everyone by leaving his position at Caldwell Community College, in Lenoir, and taking the band with him.

The Caldwell band had been one of the great success stories of the North Carolina Artist-in-Residence Program. Smith had started it as a prototype forcommunity jazz ensembles nationwide. For four years this initial version of Unifour rose from an above average amateur ensemble to a world-class jazz big band with one of the busiest performance schedules in the nation.

In 1987, the Unifour Jazz Ensemble performed or rehearsed 116 times. The band's popularity had risen so quickly that Smith could not even find the time to assemble a road crew. It was not uncommon for him to load and unload equipment, line up musicians, contract arrangers for the music, write press releases and pick up musicians to take them to to the engagements.

"Nobody knew how to even help him back in those days," said Unifour Jazz Society President, Mike Sherrill. "To tell you the truth, I'm not even sure he knew. It wasn't like today where there are all of these community jazz bands, and things like the Lila Wallace Readers Digest fund for jazz. Tom was living by his wits back then. You just knew that the boiling point was about to come."

It indeed did come in August of 1988 when Smith left Caldwell to become Artist-in-Residence at Rowan-Cabarrus Community College in Salisbury.

When Smith reorganized Unifour in its new location, a fresh life had been reinstated into the group."A lot of good things happened,"said Smith. "For one thing, we were closer to to the bigger cities so it was easier for us to get the top players. For another thing, Rowan-Cabarrus was better equiped to support the band's activities in a financial way. This is not to say that Caldwell did not try to do their best for us; because they did. It was just that the Salisbury move gave the band a little more financial breathing room, ant at the time, the band really needed money."

The move did not come without risks. Despite the advantages of being based at Rowan-Cabarrus, Smith had only a two-year contract to get the band on it's feet. In the meantime, he was also required to perform all of the regular duties of the Artist-in-Residence Program. This included solo performances for any non-profit organization that asked for them.

With the clock ticking, Smith began soliciting locations across North Carolina from where he could permanently situate the band. As much as he wanted to relocate the band in the original Unifour region, (the area surrounding Lenoir, Hickory, Morganton, and Taylorsville), he knew that the support base was simply not available to him at the time. "As for keeping the band in Salisbury, the people at the community college there, had already been so nice to us," according to Smith. " I just couldn't bring myself to even breach the subject with them. I mean, you don't go to people who have supplied you with thousands of dollars over a 2-year period, and then say, Now do this for me."

Smith's answer was to permanently try to base the band in Charlotte. For years, it had been Unifour's most reliable audience base. It had also featured many of the city's best known jazz musicians for a number of years. It was one of a number of jazz groups that rode on a crest of popularity during a Charlotte-based jazz boom in the mid to late eighties.

For over a year, Smith lobbied to base Unifour in a Charlotte educational institution. He felt he had found a location when his plans were sidetracked again when a member of Unifour itself argued successfully to keep the band out. According to long-time Unifour trumpeter Tim Phillips." This guy had been given a part-time job at this place and Tom felt that the guy wanted all the glory for himself. It really killed any long-term plans for the group."

This was not the first time that petty bickering had interferred with the band's surival. "Tom's biggest problem was that he never found a way to pay the guys," said occassional Unifour saxophonist Jack Wilkins. The arts organizations would have a fund for almost everything except that. He was asking great players to go out and play every time for free or almost free, and you would often do it because you knew the musical quality would be high.

"He kept this up for years, and believe it or not, people followed him willingly most of the time." But, as you could imagine, the lack of money for the guys brought on a lot of second guessing about the band's future and about Tom's ability to keep it going," said Wilkins. "There were also, of course, as is the case with any band that size, those people who would come in, see the visible problems, and then imagine they could do a better job." To be continued.........

Note: In the final installment of this article: Tom Smith moves the band again, breaks it up, experiences a great adventure, and restarts the band again, while discovering the meaning of life.

"All of the musicians in Unifour led their own bands," said bassist and four-year Unifour veteran Clayton Krohn. "People loved being able to play in a band with the quality that band had. But, I always felt there was a lot of behind the scenes jealousy of Tom's ideas. Many of these people had tried to do the same thing Tom was doing and had bombed. As much as they respected the band, this still bothered a lot of them, and people do vent their frustrations in different ways."

With Unifour's immediate plans in shambles, Smith found himself facing more pressing concerns. His two-year contract at Rowan-Cabarrus was up. He had to find employment or fact the prospect of no band at all.

At the eleventh hour, he found a residency at Blue Ridge Community College, in Hendersonville. The area included a number of upscale Florida transplants who had both the financial and personal initiative to support the band. They were also very knowledgable jazz afficianados.

Unfortunately, Smith's latest problem was location. Hendersonville was over one-hundred miles away from his operating base. Although he had the patron support to finally secure Unifour's ongoing existence, he now faced the agonizing problem of being too far away from his musicians. Without immediate funding for personnel to travel to his location, his new found support base was of no use to him.

For six months the band did nothing while Smith took every moment of his free time to search for a new Unifour location. In the meantime, he became friendly with a handful of Asheville based musicians that he hoped to include in his future plans. They included drummer, Byron Hedgepath, and bassist and Grammy award winner Eliot Wadopian.

In November of 1990, Smith arranged to temporarily locate Unifour at Mitchell Community College in Statesville. The school was attempting to initiate their own community jazz ensemble. Many at Mitchell felt that having Unifour there would provide the public interest needed to help motivate support for their ensemble.

This third Unifour incarnation was in many respects the strongest band of all. It featured a larger number of Winston-Salem based musicians and performed an abbreviated schedule, as Smith adjusted to driving 140 miles to be with his own band.

The new band lasted for eight months, until Smith surprised even himself by breaking it up the day of one of its greatest successes.

"I had wanted to produce a Duke Ellington program with an Ellington alumnus for years," said Smith. " We had performed with Ellington trumpter Clark Terry a couple of times, but we weren't playing an Ellington show. I wanted to do one more show with Louie Bellson."

Smith secured funding to bring Bellson to the Brevard Jazz Festival with Unifour. He dilligently rehearsed the band for over two months before dress rehearsals were scheduled. He spent an even longer period of time convincing some musicians to travel over 200 miles to play the concert.

"The Ellington show was a big deal to Tom," said Krohn. "He had 1100 tickets sold and public television was coming. He was not going to accept anything going wrong."

At 2:00 am the night before the Brevard show, Smith received a call from a trumpet player who had at that moment contracted chicken pox. "All he said was you will have to get a sub for me. Then he hung up," said Smith. Bellson was already in town, and a dress rehearsal had been scheduled in eight hours. I called Tim Phillips and he miraculously got a trumpet player at 4:00 am. I went to bed at 6:00, got up 7:00, splashed some water on my face and went to the show. I knew at that moment that this would be Unifour's last performance."

Unifour's final concert was described by many in the local and national press as a triumph. The Mississippi Rag, an international publication for jazz afficianados, even wrote a two-page review of it. Smith thanked his musicians and then walked away from the band the last time. He did not tell anyone except his immediate family of his decision. He finished his last year of his residency at Blue Ridge quietly. In 1992, the N. C. state legislature cut the Artist-in-Residence Program from its budget. Smith once again was forced to find new employment.

For years, he dropped from public view. He engaged in his longest and most costly gamble to revive the band by becoming the director of a study to build a large jazz music institution in the N.C. mountains. He was supposedly being financed by a Hendersonville man who had connections to Canadian and European investors. The school was to become the nonprofit arm of a large multifaceted corporation involved in everything from manufacturing to publishing.

"People started to become concerned," said Wadopian. "We thought all of this activity was going to kill him. It probably almost did."

The school project failed in 1994 when a hostile takeover of the company eliminated it completely. Smith was left nearly broke. "Because of the time he had spent on the school, he had lost most of his old working connections. "I think he probably thought he had let people down," said Phillips. "In hindsight, he believes he should not have put all of his eggs in one basket. I understand they still owe him over one-hundred thousand dollars."

In order to support himself and his family, Smith did the unthinkable by going back on the touring circuit as a road musician; most prominently as a solo trombonist for the Glenn Miller Orchestra and then as a musical director for a cruise ship company. During this period he seldom performed in North Carolina.

Then, in January of 1996, he came back to North Carolina and started from scratch. He accepted a public school band position and started appearing as a sideman in other people's bands. "It was like he had come back from the dead," said saxophonist Stuart Reinhardt. Most of us had not seen him in years. His solo playing was the best it had ever been, and he seemed to be comfortable with the guys again."

Smith then began to hear reports of former Unifour players attempting to bring the old band back. They started calling him at his home to inquire as to the availability of the music.

During Smith's absence, bands based on many of Unifour's techniques were formed around the nation. In North Carolina, Unifour alumnus started their own community groups. Those bands that had already been in existence became better when musicians with the old Unifour work ethic became members.

According to Phillips, "it was a funny thing. In the past, Tom had always done the lion's share of the work, and people would kind of react to whatever he was doing. Now, people found themselves forced to come up with their own ideas if they were going to continue to perform with world class bands. There are a lot of people with great bands now who have that original Unifour band to thank. Most will never admit it, of course. They will always say they were planning it all along, but most of us know better. Unifour raised the standards for community jazz around the world, and that is an indisputable fact. Before Unifour, there was nothing."

Smith sprung into action when the solicitations for a Unifour revival became more vocal. When it appeared that others were willing to do the organizational work and limit his requirements to the more relaxing duties of musical director, he authorized a full-scale resurgence of the band.

Last fall, the band booked trumpet superstar Jon Faddis to be their first guest artist. "I have finally learned that there are other things in life," said Smith. I played a lot this summer with the USAir Jazz Ensemble, and I paid close attention to their great orgainizing skill. They had ten different people doing what I used to do all by myself. All I want to do now is show up and direct the band. For making this possible, I have to thank a lot of people like Mike Sherrill and especially Tim Phillips. It looks like there may still be some life in the band yet. I'm gratified about that."

The band features several new faces including Wadopian, Hedgepeth, Greensboro standout Scott Adair and internationally acclaimed trombone artist Rick Simerle. Smith seems especially pleased that the group is finally back home in the Unifour region, recieving the support he had always hoped for.

Maybe you can come home again.