Hamish Smith was born and raised in Christchurch, New Zealand, and started on several instruments as a child before falling in love with the double bass at eleven. He developed quickly: he won the New Zealand Improvisation Contest three years running — adjudicated, in at least one of those years, by the Grammy-nominated saxophonists Eric Marienthal and Dick Oatts — and while still in secondary school he collected consecutive "Most Outstanding Bassist" and "Best Overall Musician" honors at the National Youth Jazz Competition, the New Zealand School of Music Jazz Project, and the CPIT Jazz Quest. That run of results made him one of the most talked-about young players to come out of the New Zealand jazz scene in years.

The recognition translated into a full-tuition scholarship to the Manhattan School of Music, and Smith relocated to New York in 2018 to take it up. There he studied with a lineup of bass mentors that reads like a survey of the instrument's modern lineage — Jay Anderson, Buster Williams, Ben Street, Matt Brewer — alongside saxophonist Donny McCaslin and guitarist Mike Moreno. He didn't have to wait long to put the training to use: in his first year at MSM, NEA Jazz Master and fifteen-time Grammy-winning clarinetist/saxophonist Paquito D'Rivera recruited him, at twenty-one, into his touring quintet on acoustic bass. Todd Barkan, himself an NEA Jazz Master and longtime steward of the Village Vanguard and Dizzy's Club, called Smith "a modern marvel — one of the great young bassists in the world," a line that has followed him into nearly every subsequent write-up.

Smith still holds the D'Rivera chair today, and has built out a busy freelance career around it: he plays regularly in Manuel Valera's New Cuban Express, the Rotem Sivan Trio, and Dayna Stephens Custom Deluxe, and has toured or recorded with Miguel Zenón, Yosvany Terry, Jonathan Kreisberg, Diego Urcola, Benito González, Elio Villafranca, Jochen Rueckert, Donald Edwards, Alex Sipiagin, Michael Rodriguez, Henry Hey, Magos Herrera, Zach Brock, Steven Feifke, and the Vanguard Jazz Orchestra. Among that list is saxophonist Ben Wendel — profiled separately on JazzProfiles.com — whose connection to Smith runs deeper than a shared stage: Discogs credits Wendel as producer of Rotem Sivan's Dream Louder (2024) and as both producer and saxophonist on Sivan's Heart Thieves (2025), the same two albums on which Smith plays bass, making the two working bandmates on record as well as on the road. Smith also co-founded the collaborative trio Immigrantet with Italian saxophonist Nicola Caminiti and vibraphonist Juan Diego Villalobos, a project built explicitly around themes of migration and intercultural dialogue.

Smith stepped out as a leader on October 24, 2025, with Elsewhere Now on Ropeadope Records — ten original compositions written over five years, tracing "personal and global change" through loss, resilience, transformation, and hope. The band is a small international ensemble drawn from his working circle: Nicola Caminiti on alto and soprano saxophone, Israeli pianist Eden Ladin, South Korean drummer Jongkuk Kim, Latvian vocalist Arta Jēkabsone (on five of the ten tracks), and Israeli guitarist Roy Ben Bashat, recorded at Samurai Hotel Recording Studio in New York and mixed by Chris Allen. It arrived alongside a run of release-show dates, including a hometown-adjacent stop through the DROM in New York and a Midwest run with a quartet configuration.

Beyond performing, Smith is also active as an educator and writer: he privately teaches and gives online lessons internationally, works as a guest clinician, and in 2023 published the e-book Notes on the Move, offering practical advice to young jazz musicians — many of them, like him, coming from outside the United States — on making the leap to the American scene. He is endorsed by Aguilar Amplification and Headway Music Audio.

Smith's playing is built around rhythmic inventiveness and a groove-centric feel that made him stand out even as a teenager in New Zealand's youth-jazz circuit, well before he had a New York address. That foundation — more pocket-driven than purely harmonic — is part of why bandleaders across such different idioms lean on him: Paquito D'Rivera's Latin-jazz book, Manuel Valera's Cuban-inflected quintet writing, Rotem Sivan's guitar-trio lyricism, and the big-band discipline of the Vanguard Jazz Orchestra all ask something different of a bassist, and Smith has made himself equally at home in each. As a composer and leader, Elsewhere Now shows a more reflective, song-conscious side, built around a working group of longtime collaborators rather than a one-off studio date, and drawing lyrics and vocal textures (via Arta Jēkabsone) into a catalog that had, until 2025, been defined almost entirely by his sideman work.