18 June 2012 Last updated at 20:20 ET

Scotland Inspired: Tommy Smith

Tommy Smith is a saxophonist, musician and educator

Who and what has shaped some of Scotland's most creative minds?

BBC Scotland has launched a major series - Scotland Inspired - tracing Scotland's artistic family tree, with prominent figures choosing Scots who have inspired them.

Tommy Smith is a saxophonist, musician and educator.

His precocious musical talent revealed itself in his teens and led him to the prestigious Berklee College of Music in Boston, then to playing in Paris and an illustrious recording career since the early 1980s.

He has remained the foremost Scottish jazz musician of his generation for three decades and established the Scottish National Youth Jazz Orchestra in 2002.

BBC Radio Scotland - Scotland Inspired, Episode 8 - Tuesday 19 June at 13:45

EDWIN MORGAN - poet and Scots Makar (1920 - 2010)	TOMMY SMITH SAYS
	"Eddie had a way of telling a story through the poetry. We did lots of projects together - over 60 poems I commissioned from him over the years - on many different themes. "We always talked about the different colours that we needed in our music and poetry to make it three-dimensional and not just all doom and gloom. "He was a great guy to work with because he would listen and he would give ideas and he was inspiring. "The first thing we did was Beasts of Scotland - we went through all these beasts. We obviously had to put the Loch Ness monster in the bin because he had done that already but we found 10 beasts that were up for music and poetry. "It was very enjoyable. We worked together and toured together. "He's a loss but his poetry will be in stone. It is in stone isn't it? Outside the parliament."
NORMAN MacCAIG - poet (1910 - 1996)	TOMMY SMITH SAYS
	"I got into Eddie through Norman MacCaig because he was my first love really. "His type of wit I understood better than anybody's poetry. He made me feel different things very quickly. "We met for tea and we talked about his poems and he made me play. Then we talked about the poems I would like to write some music for and he quizzed me a little bit on if I knew them that well. "And then he gave me permission to go ahead and write for 14 poems. "Norman MacCaig's Collected Poems is an encyclopaedia of similes and metaphors. It is a wonderfully rich book for that alone. "In every poem there is the instant, very sharp, shock of perception. It is immediately followed by the warmth of recognition. "The relationship between MacCaig and I was very different from Morgan. Morgan and I were more symbiotic. "With MacCaig it was more one-sided. He wrote the poems many years before and I just asked his permission. There was no collaboration in any way. "But I love his poetry. I think it is amazing."
'JAZZERS' - Joe Temperley (left) with Wynton Marsalis	TOMMY SMITH SAYS
	"A lot of the people I liked listening to when I was younger, who were Scottish but weren't in the country any more, had vanished to England and America. "People like Bobby Wellins, who was from Glasgow, who ended up in England and Joe Temperley, from Fife, who ended up in New York - these were people who inspired me. "Bobby Wellins had a very distinctive Scottish air to his sound. He had a bagpipe-like quality which is very unique for someone who plays jazz and for someone who plays saxophone in the 50s and 60s it was unheard of. "It was also unheard of for people to use themes like the Culloden battle to write music. He did that in the late 60s. He was very far ahead of his time. "He really inspired me. A lot of people say the high sound of my saxophone resembles his and I would agree that there is something there. "Joe Temperley from Fife was in Duke Ellington's band when he was younger. He's one of our best musicians. A baritone saxophone player - there's not very many on the planet who play like him. "I got the opportunity to play with him a few years ago. It is always great to play with someone you admired all these years."