Blaise Smith(I)

As Blaise Smith was growing up at the Jersey Shore, one of his influences was a local band named Steel Mill, with lead singer Bruce Springsteen, who would often play at the local parties and swim clubs. By the early 1970's Blaise formed his own group, Flashback City, and was performing at local High School proms and various concert venues. As a senior in High School, he produced his first theatrical production "A Tribute to Juanita Hall", which was highly acclaimed in the New Jersey press. (Juanita Hall grew up in Blaise's home town of Keyport, NJ and was famous for her role in Roger's and Hammerstein's "South Pacific"). Blaise continued to study classical guitar through his teen years and was awarded a full music scholarship at Montclair College. After moving to San Francisco in 1974, he became deeply involved with the SF jazz seen, performing with such jazz greats as Noel Jewkes, Michael Howell, John Tchicai and others. Eventually Blaise became involved with the vibrant punk rock scene in SF, performing and producing records with Dub Oven and Minimal Man. Throughout this time he also studied music composition at SF City College and electronic music at Mills College. His long time love of classical music and opera continued to develop while studying vocal performance (tenor) with opera great Susan Narucki. He refined his vocal technique while singing with the USF Saint Ignatius choir under the musical direction of Matt Walsh. His first venture into commercial music was a result of his winning an agency competition for a new theme song for PG&E. He then decided to open his own music company, which ultimately became Music Orange, one of the premier commercial music houses in the San Francisco Bay Area. As CEO of Music Orange he wrote and produced music for Sony, Apple, Microsoft, Unilever (Dove products), Salesforce, Google, Mitsubishi and the NFL, as well as numerous other national and international businesses. Music Orange has also provided music for network TV shows, movies and award-winning documentaries and developed one of the most respected global music libraries called "Music Orange Library Online" (MOLO). Blaise also co-wrote the theme song for "SpongeBob Squarepants" for which he has won the ASCAP Top TV Show Award for six seasons and the ASCAP Screen Music Award for Top Rated Series. Recently his music has been sampled by world famous artist J Balvin for the song "Agua", which currently has over 1 billion views on YouTube. Blaise is currently returning to his classical roots and is in the process of writing an operatic piece based on a work by the existentialist writer Heinrich Von Kleist, excerpts of which have already been recorded by singers from the Opera San Jose. The piece is scheduled to be completed in the summer of 2026.