Beginning the study of the tenor sax in 1972 as a 5^th-grader in the Princeton, Illinois, school band program, Nervous Neal Smith managed to successfully audition his way into the IMEA All-State High School Jazz Band during his junior and senior years of high school. Encouraged by these early victories, he chose to study music performance, music education and music journalism at Illinois State University, placing in the school’s top performing jazz ensemble all four years.

In addition to live performances with artists such as Dizzy Gillespie, Bernard Allison, The Temptations, Martha Reeves & The Vandellas, The Marvellettes, Alex Chilton & The Box Tops, Louie Bellson, Buddy DeFranco, Clark Terry, Chuck Loeb, Garrett Morris of “Saturday Night Live”, Debby Boone & the Quad City Symphony Orchestra, and Terry Blackwood & The Imperials, he was invited to perform as a featured soloist with the Central Illinois Jazz Orchestra at the Montreux Jazz Festival in 2003. Neal has also composed, arranged, recorded and performed with local groups The Kabalas, Einstein’s Sister, and The Metrolites, with several of his compositions and recordings being licensed for use in independent films, and on cable TV. He is featured as a soloist on over 50 commercially-released recordings as well as dozens of local radio and television jingles. In 2019, compositions he wrote and recorded in his home studio were featured on NBC Sports, The Science Channel, and truTV. He was invited to serve as Davenport’s musical ambassador to its sister city of Kaiserslautern, Germany, for a celebration commemorating the 60^th anniversary of the cities’ partnership in June 2020.

Based in the Quad Cities since 1987, he recently took a four-year break from private teaching to work as a jazz saxophonist at sea and to compose, arrange and perform with New York City-based film soundtrack ensemble Morricone Youth. Apart from that extended busman’s holiday, Neal has been teaching privately part-time since 1982 and full-time since 1993, currently from his home studio in central Davenport. He recently finished composing and recording an original soundtrack for the 1912 film, “The Land Beyond the Sunset.”