The Incredible Jimmy Smith

The other day I was re-shelving my copy of guitarist Johnny Smith's fine 1968 release titled Phase II.  Since my LPs are alphabetized by last name, right next to Johnny Smith was Jimmy Smith, the wizard of the Hammond B-3 organ.  I'm a big fan of Jimmy Smith, and since I hadn't listened to any of his albums for a while I took a couple down for a spin.  They were so hot and funky that after the first two I pulled out a couple more, and then a couple more.  Next thing you know it's three days later, and I'm still listening to Jimmy Smith.  To quote from the title of one my favorite Jimmy Smith albums, Damn!

The Incredible Jimmy Smith at the Hammond B-3

Smith was born in the Philadelphia suburb of Norristown on December 8, 1928.  As a child, he learned some piano from his father, but was largely self taught.  While just a teenager, he began playing gigs in the Philadelphia area, earning a reputation for his stride style technique.  When Smith was 15, he quit school and joined the Navy where he played piano and bass in a segregated Navy band.  After his enlistment was up, he came back to the Philadelphia area to study music on the G.I. bill and once again began gigging in clubs.  Beginning in 1951 and continuing for several years, he played off and on with an R&B group called Don Gardner's Sonotones.

In 1953, Smith heard Wild Bill Davis (below), a pioneer of jazz organ, at the Harlem Club in Atlantic City.  Davis' playing had such an impact on Smith that he decided then and there to switch from piano to organ.  After the set, Smith had a chance to talk with Davis and told him about his decision.  Davis cautioned Smith that it wouldn't be easy, warning that it could take years just to master the foot pedals on the organ.  Undaunted, Smith spent the next couple of years continuing to play piano at night in clubs while teaching himself to play the organ during the day.

In a 1994 interview with former Bay Area DJ and B-3 aficionado Pete Fallico, Smith explains how it worked:  "I got my first organ from a loan shark and had it shipped to a warehouse.  I stayed in that warehouse, I would say, six months to a year."  Smith says he treated it like a job, packing a lunch and practicing all day by himself.  "Nobody showed me anything, man, so I had to fiddle around with my stops."  In the end, Smith says, "I pulled out that third harmonic and there!  The bulb lit up, thunder and lightning!  Stars came out of the sky!"  Fallico comments that "Jimmy emerged from that warehouse a new and different organist with a truly original approach and registration. His new sound would prove to be the standard for Jazz organists who followed."

By 1955, Smith was ready to strike out on his own, working with a drummer and guitarist in what would become his signature trio style.  In the summer of that year, Smith was back in Atlantic City to play some dates - this time with his own trio - and the jazz world began to take notice.  Babs Gonzales, a jazz vocalist and well-connected NYC music writer, says that when Smith opened in Atlantic City, "Within three days the news reached me about this insane organist, and I drove down to "dig" for myself.  What I heard was a cat playing. . .futuristic stratospheric sounds that were never before explored on the organ."

Gonzales got word to Alfred Lion at Blue Note Records and told him he had to hear this dynamo named Jimmy Smith.  Some months later, in January 1956, Smith and his trio played their first New York gig at Small's Paradise in Harlem.  They followed that with a date at Cafe Bohemia in Greenwich Village, where Alfred Lion was in the audience.  Lion was blown away by what he heard and immediately signed Smith to record for Blue Note.

Lion wasted no time getting Smith in the recording studio.  On February 18, only a few weeks after the show at Cafe Bohemia, Lion booked a session for Smith at Rudy Van Gelder's studio in Hackensack, N.J.  Along with Thornel Schwartz on guitar and Bazeley "Bay" Perry on drums, Smith cut ten tracks at his first recording session.  Nine of them ended up on Smith's first Blue Note release (BLP 1512), titled A New Sound - A New Star - Jimmy Smith At The Organ (above).  [Fun fact: Gonzales wrote the liner notes for Smith's first Blue Note album.]

As an indication of Alfred Lion's commitment to Smith and his confidence in Smith's marketability, the first release is billed as Vol. 1, and the back liner lists the cuts for the upcoming Vol. 2, which would appear as Blue Note BLP 1514 only a month later.  In all, Blue Note released five albums by Smith in 1956 and another seven albums in 1957.  Eleven albums in two years' time!  Before Smith left Blue Note for Verve in 1962, he had put out 19 albums.  But Blue Note wasn't done with Jimmy Smith.  Lion had plenty of unused session tracks in the vault, and the label put out 10 more albums by Smith over the coming decades, including a final album in 2007 called Straight Life containing unreleased tracks from a 1961 session.

After moving to Verve, a bigger label with a bigger budget and more promotional muscle, Smith's popularity and sales grew exponentially.  In contrast to his trio and small group recordings at Blue Note, legendary Verve producer Creed Taylor put Smith in the studio with large bands and crack arrangers like Claus Ogerman, Oliver Nelson, Gerald Wilson, and Lalo Schifrin, creating a more contemporary and marketable sound.  Smith's first album for Verve, called Bashin' (left), made it into Billboard's Top 10 album chart.  Over the next six years, Smith had an incredible 18 albums in the charts.  You could probably win a bar bet by challenging someone to name the best-selling jazz artist of the 1960s: It was Jimmy Smith by a mile.

An unbylined obituary on the NBC news website nicely sums up Smith's place in the jazz Pantheon.  "Although Smith wasn’t the first to play jazz on the Hammond B3 organ, his virtuosity over the instrument combined with his brilliant infusion of gospel, blues and R&B riffs and melodies into bebop-inspired improvisations place him alongside other jazz pioneers, such as Charlie Parker, Art Tatum and John Coltrane – artists who revolutionized the way their respective instruments were played and who are continuing to have a profound influence over other instrumentalists."  

According to Discogs, Smith released 107 albums during his lifetime, not counting compilations or guest appearances on other artists' albums.  I have 37 of his LPs, and another 50 or so CDs ripped to my computer.  Since there is some overlap between my LPs and CDs, I am still missing at least 30-35 albums.  Sadly, a number of Smith's later releases have never appeared on vinyl, including the aforementioned Damn! (right), which came out in 1995 on CD only.  [Damn! features a killer version of James Brown's classic "Papa's Got A Brand New Bag," which is worth the price of admission all by itself.]  The sessions for Damn! (and a subsequent album called Angel Eyes) were the last times that Smith recorded for Verve.  On the off chance that anyone at Verve ever sees this, end the madness and release Damn! on vinyl.

Smith's early Blue Note LPs are the most prized by die-hard bebop fans and are by far the most collectible.  The good news is that even the deep groove, mono first pressings of Smith's Blue Note albums can usually be found for a couple of hundred dollars or less - which is very reasonable by Blue Note standards.  Reissued versions of Smith's Blue Note catalog are also available and reasonably priced for the most part, although finding copies in NM condition can be a challenge.  Smith's Verve output sold so well that original releases in nice shape are not hard to find; I see them pretty regularly for $5-10.

Last fall, Blue Note reissued Smith's terrific 1964 album Prayer Meetin', which features tenor saxman Stanley Turrentine (below left).  It's part of Blue Note's wildly successful Tone Poet audiophile reissue series, and is well worth picking up before it sells out.  Blue Note also recently announced a reissue of Smith's 1963 classic Back At The Chicken Shack (below right) as part of a different series called Classic Vinyl Edition.  Both of these reissues are cut by Kevin Gray using the original master tapes.  Chicken Shack is due out in June, and is available for preorder now.  I've already reserved my copy.

Verve Records began its own classic jazz reissue series in 2020, but so far they have not announced any albums by Jimmy Smith as part of the lineup.  Damn.

Enjoy the music!