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Allen Smith, a prolific jazz trumpeter who helped break the color barrier in San Francisco nightclubs and served as a local schoolteacher and administrator, died on February 3 at the Veterans Administration Hospital in San Francisco.

Mr. Smith, 85, died from complications of dementia, according to his son, Peter Fitzsimmons, who serves as Executive Director of the Jazz Heritage Center in San Francisco.

A fluid and versatile player raised on the sounds of Duke Ellington and Count Basie, Mr. Smith performed with stars like Ella Fitzgerald, Tony Bennett and Benny Goodman. He also sat in with countless Bay Area bands, and was a featured performer with classic jazz vocalist Lavay Smith and her Red Hot Skillet Lickers.

Smith also received the Beacon Lifetime Achievement award from SFJAZZ in 2004.

According to an obituary in the San Francisco Chronicle,

Mr. Smith was a mainstay at the fabled Fillmore after-hours club, Jimbo's Bop City. Along with venerable jazz bassist Vernon Alley, drummer Earl Watkins and others, Mr. Smith helped end segregation in San Francisco nightclubs in the late '40s. He was one of the primary players at the short-lived Blanco's Cotton Club on O'Farrell Street, the city's first desegregated club in the elegant 1907 theater now called the Great American Music Hall.

"Opening a club with all-black entertaining and help, where anybody could come? That was quite radical at the time," Mr. Smith recalled in 1998.

In 1958, he took a sabbatical from his elementary school teaching job and moved to New York. He turned down an offer to join Basie and decided instead to tour with Benny Goodman. He returned to San Francisco and for many years taught in Hunters Point until becoming the principal of Junipero Serra School in San Francisco.

"He wanted the security because he knew what life was like for a musician, particularly after working with Benny Goodman on the road," Fitzsimmons said. "He was thinking about raising the family and being a responsible adult. But he didn't turn his back on music. Somehow he was able to balance it all."

"You learned from those who knew, who went before you," Mr. Smith told The Chronicle in 1998. "One of the things I learned from the older guys was to tell a story. Whether you're reading a poem or singing a song, it's got to be your story."

In recent years, Allen returned to the jazz stage, making regular appearances with Lavay Smith and Her Red Hot Skillet Lickers, Pat Yankee and Kim Nalley.

In addition to his son Peter Fitzsimmons, Mr. Smith is survived by his wife, Juliette; sons, Anthony of Boston and Rick of San Francisco; a daughter, Jennifer of Vienna; a brother, Wayne of Daly City; and six grandchildren.

Memorial services are pending.