Happy Birthday, Jimmy Smith!

Jimmy Smith is the acknowledged master of the Hammond B-3 organ. In fact, the B-3 is the only instrument in jazz on which you'd find so little disagreement about who was the greatest player. And Smith took up the instrument relatively late.

     Smith was born on this date in 1925 (although some members of his family claimed he was actually three years younger) in Norristown, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Philadelphia. Both his parents were pianists, and young Jimmy took up that instrument as well. He joined the Navy in World War Two, where he played both piano and bass in segregated band. After his discharge, Smith attended the Hamilton and Ornstein schools of music in Philadelphia, studying piano and bass while working jobs in construction and on the railroad.

     In 1951, he was playing rhythm-and-blues piano with Don Gardner's Sonotones and toying with the idea of playing the B-3 organ. That's when he heard Wild Bill Davis, the "organ king" of the day, playing at an Atlantic City club and Smith knew he had to make the switch. He bought his first organ in 1954 and kept it in a Philadelphia warehouse, where he practiced on it.

     In January 1956, Smith made his debut in New York City at Small's Paradise in Harlem, then he made a splash at the 1957 Newport Jazz Festival, and the rest is history. He started recording with Blue Note Records shortly afterward with the hit A New Sound, a New Star: Jimmy Smith at the Organ, and he made over 30 additional albums for the label, including The Sermon! (1958), Midnight Special (1960), Back at the Chicken Shack (also 1960), and Prayer Meetin' (1963).
     Smith played a winning combination of R&B-inflected blues and bop in an earthy groove that came to be called the "Philadelphia sound." He had a very percussive fingering attack on the organ and emphasized certain notes in the lower ranges much like someone playing a string bass. Before Smith, the organ got little respect in the jazz world - his appearance on the scene changed everything.

     He switched to Verve Records in the 1960s, with whom he recorded over 30 more albums. He worked with many of the great jazz musicians of the day, including Kenny Burrell, Grant Green, Stanley Turrentine, Lee Morgan, Lou Donaldson, Tina Brooks, and Jackie McLean. In the 1970s, Smith took a break from touring and opened an supper club in Los Angeles, where he regularly played. But in the 1980s and 1990s, he started recording and touring again, right up to his death in 2005. In his final year, Smith was awarded the NEA Jazz Masters Award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

     One of my favorite albums of Smith's is the aforementioned Midnight Special, where a quiet, swinging groove is maintained throughout by Kenny Burrell on guitar, Stanley Turrentine on sax, and Donald Bailey on drums. Here is a video of Smith playing the title tune from that album live in 1992.

Jimmy Smith - "The Sermon" (1964)

Jimmy Smith, organ; Quentin Warren, guitar; and Billy Hart, drums. From a BBC-TV broadcast.

Shirley Scott - "Queen of the Organ"

Jazz history is riddled with stories about the tragic consequences of drug use. But organist Shirley Scott was certainly the only jazz musician to succumb to the effects of a diet drug.
     Scott was born in Philadelphia in 1934. She played piano and trumpet before settling in at the Hammond B-3 organ. She was an admirer of fellow Philadelphian Jimmy Smith, as were so many other jazz artists. Scott first came to prominence working with  sax great Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis in the late 1950s, particularly on the 1958 hit song “In the Kitchen.” Her style encompassed bebop chordal harmonies with a blues and gospel influenced sense of rhythm; she had a lighter touch but punctuated her playing with the bass pedal (as Jimmy Smith did), epitomizing the soul-jazz organ sound. “On the organ, no one knows how many different sounds you can get. It's an infinite number of tones,” Scott once said. “The only problem is taste. Most people think of electricity as the ability to drown everybody else out. I don't play like that.”

     In the 1960s, Scott teamed up - personally and professionally - with sax man Stanley Turrentine, and this collaboration produced winning music over a number of years. Scott’s 1963 albums The Soul is Willing and Soul Shoutin’ are a great place to hear her play if you don’t know her music (they are available together on a Prestige CD). Turrentine’s Never Let Me Go, Hustlin’ (probably my favorite), and Let It Go are also wonderful albums from this period, mixtures of blues, bop, and pop songs, with great interaction between sax and organ. On her dates from the late Sixties, Scott tended to include a few too may pop tunes, which perhaps tainted her reputation somewhat. Did we really need an organ rendition of “On a Clear Day (You Can See Forever)” or The Beatles’ “Something”?
     Scott recorded less in the 1970s as organ combos fell out of favor, but she returned again in the following decade, including on dates with Al Grey, Jimmy Forrest, and Dexter Gordon. She also did some piano recordings in the 1990s. By some estimates, over her entire career, Scott recorded an astounding fifty records as a leader - "Queen of the Organ" indeed! In the mid-1990s, she began taking the diet drug fen-phen, which was later proven to cause damage to the heart. Scott actually sued the manufacturer, American Home Products, and was awarded $8 million by a Philadelphia jury in 2000. But Scott succumbed to heart disease in March 2002.

In Praise of Mr. T

Tenor saxophonist Stanley Turrentine was born in Pittsburgh in 1934. He came from a musical family – his father, mother, and brother all played instruments. He played with rhythm and blues bands in the early 1950s before moving into jazz with Earl Bostic, Max Roach, and others. Throughout his career, he recorded with Blue Note, CTI, Fantasy, and other labels. He died in 2000.
     The original “Mr. T” is one of my favorite musicians, particularly for his Blue Note albums in the 1960s. He is underappreciated as a sax player, probably because of the more popular, cross-over material he did in the 1970s and 1980s. And perhaps he did become too commercial - success has its price, I guess. My feeling is that the material Turrentine did with Blue Note is so outstanding that he deserves reconsideration.
     Turrentine did some excellent work as a sideman with organist Jimmy Smith. Back at the Chicken Shack, Midnight Special, and Prayer Meetin’ show a great rapport between the two as they exchange bluesy solos. Also as a sideman, Turrentine appeared on one of my favorite albums of all time, guitarist Kenny Burrell’s Midnight Blue (1963). This deeply grooving album is the very definition of the Blue Note sound at this time, and Burrell and Turrentine try to top each other throughout. There’s not a dud on the album.
     His albums as a leader with Blue Note are also winners, a kind of soul-jazz soundtrack for the Sixties. His first, Look Out!, contains some great blues licks and that big tenor sound of his, particularly on Stan’s own compositions “Little Sheri,” “Minor Chant,” and the title tune. He has a very masculine and smooth tone, never harsh. A more subdued but still bluesy Stan can be heard in small group settings on Up at Minton’s and Blue Hour.
     One of my favorites is his album Hustlin’ from 1964. The great B-3 organist Shirley Scott (also Stan’s wife at the time) and Kenny Burrell set the ground groove, with Stan bubbling above on sax. It opens with a great version of “Trouble” followed by a gospel-tinged number by Scott called “Ladyfingers” with powerful solos by both Scott and Stan. “Goin’ Home,” based on the Largo movement from Dvorak’s New World Symphony, provides a lilting and melancholy coda to the album. Hustlin’ showcases both his fat burnished sound on ballads and his more earthy, blues sensibility.
     Perhaps Turrentine was more of a straight-ahead player than a virtuoso, but his polished yet blues-drenched solos provided a distinctive voice on the sax for half a century. His place in the jazz pantheon ought to be moved up an octave.