Jimmy Smith

Smith was thirty years old when he made his first record, which is late for a debut and part of why it arrives already finished. February 18, 1956, Van Gelder's room in Hackensack, with Thornel Schwartz on guitar and Bay Perry on drums. Get the drummer right, because it goes wrong constantly: it is Perry, not Donald Bailey, who does not turn up until the March 27 session five weeks later and then gets credited backward onto this one. Ten titles went down that day and nine were issued.

What surprises people is how wide the program is. Kern and Gershwin standards sit next to a Dimitri Tiomkin film theme, Horace Silver's "The Preacher", and a 3:13 run at Bach's "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring" that the jacket lists as plain "Joy". Blue Note then pulled three separate 45s off the one session, 45-1635, 45-1636 and 45-1637, which is a lot of singles activity for a jazz LP by a man nobody had heard of. Babs Gonzales wrote the notes, a bebop singer rather than a critic.

Scott Yanow's line at AllMusic is the one worth keeping: Smith "introduced a completely new and very influential style on the organ, one that virtually changed the way the instrument is played." The mechanics of that style are the part everybody argues about online. Smith handled the bass line himself, with no bassist in the room, and exactly how he did it is contested enough that this page will not print a method. What matters in the listening is that the bottom never sags and nobody is playing it but him.

One buying note before you go hunting. There is no true stereo original. BST 81512 is electronically rechanneled fake stereo, flagged as such by jazzdisco, so a seller advertising a stereo first pressing is either confused or hoping you are. The title varies too, since Wikipedia, the jacket and the CD all render it differently. Buy the mono, ignore the catalog copy, and know that everything Smith did for the next sixteen years is sitting in these nine tracks.

Two afternoons in a hotel ballroom produced two albums, and this is one of them. House Party draws on August 25, 1957 and February 25, 1958 at the Manhattan Towers in New York, and so does The Sermon!. Not a Van Gelder studio date, though Van Gelder still ran the tape. Why Blue Note chose the ballroom is not documented, though the likeliest reason is that a bigger band would not fit in Hackensack.

The original LP is four tracks, two of them fifteen minute blowing vehicles, and the personnel moves under your feet. Lee Morgan, Curtis Fuller and George Coleman on the 1957 material. Lou Donaldson, Tina Brooks and Art Blakey turning up on "Au Privave" from 1958. Then "Lover Man" strips back to the working trio plus Donaldson. Kenny Burrell and Eddie McFadden split the guitar chair track by track. It is effectively two records stapled together, and you can see the staples.

That is the fun of it. Alfred Lion had one pile of ballroom tape and cut two very different LPs out of it, then went back years later for more: the 1979 vault album Confirmation and the 1981 On the Sunny Side both come from the same well. Nothing about the sequencing was accidental. House Party got the horn-heavy jam material and the sprawl, while The Sermon! took the twenty minute blues and the patience.

Three stars, and the reason is structural rather than musical. Everybody plays well, particularly Morgan. But an album where the front line changes between tracks and one number is a completely different band never quite becomes a record. Buy the LP for "Au Privave", know that the 1987 CD is a different program (it drops "Au Privave" and "Lover Man" and adds "J.O.S.", "What Is This Thing Called Love" and "Cherokee", all from the August 1957 date), and do not let anyone sell you this as "the House Party session". No such session exists.

Side one is one track and it runs 20:12. That is most of the pitch. "The Sermon" is a blues taken at walking pace with nowhere in particular to be, cut February 25, 1958 at the Manhattan Towers ballroom, and Blue Note still chopped it into a two-part 45 in 1959. Somebody sat in an office and decided a twenty minute blues could be split across a seven inch single. The other two tracks come from the same pair of ballroom dates that produced House Party.

Listen to how the band shifts inside a single afternoon. Lou Donaldson and Tina Brooks play "The Sermon" and sit out "Flamingo", which was cut as the take just before it. Lee Morgan, Kenny Burrell and Art Blakey are on both. "J.O.S." comes from August 1957 with George Coleman and Eddie McFadden. One tape, three different groups, one LP. The February date also gave up "Confirmation", which Blue Note left in a vault for twenty one years before issuing it.

Ira Gitler wrote the notes and AllMusic's Lindsay Planer calls it "a prime example of Smith and company's myriad of talents", which undersells the thing. The real argument for the title track is pacing. Blakey does almost nothing for long stretches, Burrell comps in the cracks, and Smith keeps turning the same figure over until it stops being a figure and becomes a room you are standing in. It is the clearest case on record of what an organ trio can do that a piano trio cannot.

Smith played the bass himself. The exact drawbar settings and bass technique that circulate online for this record are undocumented, so they are left out here. There is a longer piece on this record in our Liner Notes section if you want the single-album version.

No star horn anywhere on it. The spine of Home Cookin' is Smith, Kenny Burrell and Donald Bailey, with Percy France added on tenor for four of the seven tracks, and France was a working New York player rather than a Blue Note name. Three sessions fed the album: July 15, 1958, then May 24 and June 16, 1959, all at Hackensack. That last detail matters. Van Gelder did not open the Englewood Cliffs room until July 1959, so this is an old-room record.

The writing credits tell you what kind of album it is. Two tunes are Burrell's, one is by the rival organist Jimmy McGriff, and Smith contributed only two himself. Nobody is showing off. "See See Rider" and "I Got a Woman" are blues and gospel material played by men who grew up inside it, at tempos a working bar band would pick at eleven at night. Burrell in particular sounds like he has nothing to prove and plenty of time.

The Penguin Guide calls this whole stretch of Smith's output formulaic, singles out Burrell, and lands on "A solid one". AllMusic's Lindsay Planer goes the other way and treats it as a good starting place. Both readings are fair. If you want the fireworks, go to the ballroom records. If you want to know what Smith sounded like on an ordinary Tuesday with a guitarist he trusted, this is it, and it has worn better than the flashier ones.

Assembly note, since it explains the two year gap between the last session and the 1961 release: this was built out of three separate dates rather than recorded as an album. The June 1959 session also produced a Percy France original called "Apostrophe" that Blue Note sat on until 1981. And the CD adds five bonus tracks including alternates, so the long program you may be streaming is not the record.

April 25, 1960, Englewood Cliffs, one afternoon, ten masters cut. Five of them became this album, four became Back at the Chicken Shack, and one sat in the vault until 1981. Say that out loud before going further, because these two records get written about as though Smith went back into the studio a couple of years later to make a sequel. He did not. Same day, same band, same tape, two releases spaced two years apart.

The group is Smith, Stanley Turrentine on tenor and Donald Bailey on drums, with Kenny Burrell on three of the five tracks and absent from the other two. So the record slides between a quartet and a pianoless organ-and-tenor trio without announcing the change. Turrentine is the reason to buy it either way. Nobody else on the label played a blues line with that much weight behind the note and that little hurry about getting to the next one.

The repertoire leans Kansas City harder than a soul jazz date usually does. "One O'Clock Jump" is Basie's, "Jumpin' the Blues" comes out of Jay McShann and Charlie Parker, and "A Subtle One" is Turrentine's own, one of very few Turrentine originals in this catalog. Blue Note pulled two 45s from the date for this LP, including a two-part title track. Scott Yanow's AllMusic verdict is simply "highly recommended", which is about the right length for a review of this record.

Five stars, and I will defend it against the Chicken Shack partisans. The title track is the better groove, the two tracks without Burrell give you Turrentine with nothing to lean on, and the sequencing breathes in a way the companion album does not quite manage. Del Shields wrote these liner notes and Ira Gitler wrote the ones on the other album. Small thing, but the two records get confused so often that it is worth keeping straight.

This one comes from the same afternoon. Four of the ten masters cut on April 25, 1960 became this LP, and Blue Note then held it until 1963, nearly three years after the date and more than a year after Midnight Special. That is the longest vault delay on this page and it is worth sitting with for a second: a record that ended up in 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die spent almost three years in a filing cabinet while the label put out other things.

The lineup is identical to the companion album, Smith with Stanley Turrentine and Donald Bailey, Kenny Burrell on two of the four tracks. "Minor Chant" is a Turrentine tune and it is one of the two Burrell sits out, so the most Turrentine-forward piece here is also the leanest in texture. The title track is the famous one and earns it. The tempo is almost lazy and it never drags for a bar, which is a much harder trick than playing fast.

Blue Note pulled two two-part 45s off it, one for the title track and one for "Minor Chant", with the label copy reading "From Blue Note LP 4117". You will also see February 12, 1963 quoted as the release date. Wikipedia gives that day and Discogs dates the original LP to February 1963, but neither cites a primary source for the exact day, so February 1963 is as far as this page will go.

One more note for anyone buying by tracklist. The original LP is four tracks. Wikipedia's list and its Burrell credits are numbered against the CD, which adds "On the Sunny Side of the Street", the leftover from the same 1960 afternoon that first appeared on a 1981 vault album. If your copy has five tracks you have a reissue, and there is nothing wrong with that as long as you know which record you are describing.

Six years and roughly twenty albums into Blue Note, Smith signed with Verve, and Creed Taylor built the debut around the contrast the title promises. Four tracks with a sixteen-piece Oliver Nelson band, three with the working trio of Quentin Warren and Donald Bailey. Two dates, March 26 and March 28, 1962, both at Englewood Cliffs with Van Gelder still engineering. The room did not change at all. Everything arranged around Smith inside it did.

"Walk on the Wild Side", from Elmer Bernstein's score for the 1962 film, went to number 21 on the Billboard Hot 100 and was the biggest hit Smith had to that point. A Hammond organ instrumental sitting in the pop top twenty five is the whole reason his Verve years look the way they do, and Verve knew it: the tune came out as a two-part 45 in 1962 and got repressed as a single again in 1967.

The big band is a first-call New York roster. Phil Woods on lead alto, Joe Newman and Ernie Royal and Joe Wilder in the trumpets, Jimmy Cleveland and Urbie Green and Britt Woodman on trombones, George Duvivier and Barry Galbraith in the rhythm section, plus a young Doc Severinsen and Ed Shaughnessy who both later anchored the Tonight Show band. Nelson wrote for Smith rather than over him, which is the difficult part and the reason this works at all.

Four stars, held back by the format rather than the playing. The trio tracks are excellent, the big band tracks are excellent, and together they add up to a well-made sampler of two directions rather than one album. Watch the billing if you go shopping: the original jacket credits "The Unpredictable Jimmy Smith" with the title "Bashin'", which is why Discogs files it in a way that will confuse you for a minute.

This was the last of four Blue Note sessions Smith cut inside nine days: January 31, February 1, February 7 and February 8, 1963. The other three became Rockin' the Boat, Bucket! and I'm Movin' On, so one crowded week and a bit kept producing albums for the next four years. You will read that the burst was about finishing off a contract before jumping to Verve. Nothing verifies it, and Bashin' had already come out on Verve in 1962, so the story does not fit the calendar.

The band is the road unit rather than a pickup group. Quentin Warren on guitar and Donald Bailey on drums had been Smith's working trio for years, with Stanley Turrentine added on tenor, and the tightness is audible from the first chorus. Six titles cut, all six on the LP, nothing rejected, which almost never happens. Joe Goldberg wrote the notes and Blue Note pulled two 45s out of the date, both split across two sides in the usual way.

The repertoire is what separates this from every other Smith quartet date, and it is not standards. Ivory Joe Hunter's "I Almost Lost My Mind", Wilmoth Houdini's calypso "Stone Cold Dead in the Market", "When the Saints Go Marching In", and Gene Ammons's "Red Top", which ties this record straight into another corner of the site. That is a Black popular songbook rather than a Broadway one, and choosing it changes the temperature of the whole album.

A note for CD buyers, because Wikipedia contradicts itself here. Its opening says the two bonus tracks come from the same session. Its own tracklist note, backed by jazzdisco, says "Lonesome Road" and "Smith Walk" come from June 13, 1960 with Sam Jones added on bass. The June 1960 attribution is the right one, which means Sam Jones is nowhere near the album itself, only the extras. Some pressings also bill it "Jimmy Smith with Stanley Turrentine"; the primary sources file it under Smith alone.

Fifteen brass plus rhythm, Lalo Schifrin conducting his own charts, two dates at Englewood Cliffs on April 27 and April 29, 1964. This is the commercial summit of the whole career: number 12 on the Billboard 200, with the title track reaching number 67 on the Hot 100 for the weeks of September 26 and October 3, 1964. A Hammond organ record parked in the pop album top fifteen is not something that happens to anybody twice.

What keeps it from being a novelty is the rhythm section. Kenny Burrell, George Duvivier and Grady Tate are underneath the orchestra the entire time, which means Smith brought a working jazz quartet inside a twenty piece studio band instead of sitting on top of one. Listen past the brass on "Basin Street Blues" and there is a small group record going on down there, with Tate doing the kind of unshowy work that makes an arrangement swing.

Three of the eight tracks are film music, Schifrin's own "Theme from Joy House" and the title tune, plus Elmer Bernstein's "Main Title from The Carpetbaggers". The rest is W.C. Handy, Spencer Williams and Harold Arlen, with an Eddie Harris tune in "Chicago Serenade" and one Smith blues in "Delon's Blues" tucked in beside them. A film score sharing a record with two blues written by working jazz musicians is a stranger program than the cover leads you to expect.

Two housekeeping items before we move on. The Grammy story is half right: the album itself did not win, but Schifrin's title tune won Best Original Jazz Composition at the 1965 Grammys, as a composition rather than an arrangement. Second, Wikipedia says B-3 while jazzdisco just says organ, and nothing documents the specific instrument used on these two dates, so Hammond organ is as precise as anyone can honestly be.

One night, February 8, 1972, at the Bombay Bicycle Club in Los Angeles, and the band on stage is a funk band. Arthur Adams on guitar, Wilton Felder of the Crusaders playing electric bass rather than his saxophone, Paul Humphrey on drums, Buck Clarke on congas, Steve Williams on harmonica. They close in on Al Green's "Let's Stay Together", which was brand new that winter. Nothing about this is a jazz pickup date, and nothing about it apologizes.

The Beastie Boys sampled "Root Down (And Get It)" for "Root Down" on Ill Communication in 1994, which is how most people under fifty got here. Good. It is a legitimate way in, and the original is heavier than the sample suggests. Stephen Thomas Erlewine's AllMusic verdict is that this and "Sagg Shootin' His Arrow" are among the hottest tracks Smith ever cut and that the album is one of the finest things in his catalog. He is not overselling it.

So buy carefully, because the original 1972 pressing is heavily trimmed. The 2000 Verve By Request remaster restores the unedited performances and the numbers are not close: "Sagg Shootin' His Arrow" goes from 7:09 to 11:45, "Root Down (And Get It)" from 7:44 to 12:39, "Slow Down Sagg" from 6:43 to 10:22, plus a previously unissued alternate. On a record whose entire appeal is a band settling into a groove and refusing to leave, four minutes is not a detail.

Two corrections while you shop. The catalog number is V6-8806, whatever Wikipedia prints, and Discogs shows it on both the cover and the labels. The number 24 peak you will see quoted is on the Billboard jazz albums chart, not the Billboard 200, so do not let anyone upgrade it. And no producer is credited on the original jacket at all, only Eddie Ray as executive producer, so any listing that names one is guessing.