JAZZPORT – Caleb Smith on Piano

Get ready for JAZZPORT, jet-setting with a side of jazz! Travelers at Pittsburgh International Airport can catch pop-up piano performances bringing the electrifying and sultry grooves of the 15th Annual Pittsburgh International Jazz Festival straight to the terminal throughout the month of September leading up to the festival. Layovers never sounded so good! 

The Pittsburgh International Airport presents “JAZZPORT” series, which highlights Pittsburgh’s most promising artists, flying high in support of the Pittsburgh International Jazz Festival presented by the August Wilson Center and Highmark Blue Cross Blue Shield.

Performer-composer and curator Caleb Alexander Smith is an Ohio born multi-faceted artist interested in traversing diverse sonic landscapes within worlds of his own creation, education as healing, and, above all, storytelling. Through his art Caleb wants experiencers to be guided through a journey that will surprise them and put them in a state of inquisition. He wants his audiences to ask questions; asking questions is the first step in the pursuit of knowledge (one of life’s most important pursuits).

Caleb studied at the Oberlin and New England Conservatories of Music, as well as the Kennedy Center’s Betty Carter Jazz Ahead and the Banff Centre’s International Workshop in Jazz and Creative Music.

Most recently, Caleb premiered an original piece, commissioned by Sugar Hill Salon, for woodwind trio at Lucille’s Harlem. Caleb has performed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art for their Flight into Egypt: Black Artists and Ancient Egypt, 1876–Now exhibit, premiering Zekkereya El-magharbel’s commission piece, Landscapes of the Northeast. Caleb has also performed with Lauryn Hill, Terrence Blanchard, Lonnie Holley, John Clayton, and as a freelancer across the Midwest and in New York City. In 2022 Caleb embarked on a month-long tour through Europe (Italy, Germany, and the Netherlands) with Cleveland based group Mourning [A] BLKstar. With regard to recorded music, Caleb can be heard on Dan Bruce’s Time to Mind the Mystics, Micah Thomas’ Mountains, and on his Instagram profile at calebapple123.

Caleb has premiered original works at Oberlin Conservatory of Music, Jazz at Lincoln Center, Close Up NYC, and at Lucille’s Harlem in collaboration with Sugar Hill Salon.

Caleb’s primary mediums are piano/keyboards, trombone, flute, and written pieces of fiction.