Side one of The Sermon! runs twenty minutes and twelve seconds and it is all one song. That is the entire side.
I started it once and did not touch anything again until I parked.
That is the argument for this record on a Monday. Skipping is a decision. At seven in the morning you do not want decisions. You want to press play once and leave it alone. A slow blues that runs twenty minutes does that better than a record full of four minute tunes.
Blue Note put it out in 1959. It came from two sessions, August 25, 1957 and February 25, 1958. Neither one happened at Rudy Van Gelder's place in Hackensack. Both were cut in the ballroom of the Manhattan Towers Hotel, which Blue Note used when a band was too big for Van Gelder's room or when the location suited the musicians better. Van Gelder engineered these anyway and Alfred Lion produced. Same crew, bigger room.
Worth knowing what Van Gelder's room actually was at that point. He was still recording most Blue Note dates in his parents' living room in Hackensack. The Englewood Cliffs studio did not open until the summer of 1959.
The title track is the February 1958 date. Jimmy Smith on organ, Lee Morgan on trumpet, Lou Donaldson on alto, Tina Brooks on tenor, Kenny Burrell on guitar, Art Blakey on drums.
Look at that band again. That is a lot of talent standing around a slow blues.
Lee Morgan was nineteen. He sounds like he has nowhere to be.
Nobody rushes on this thing. That is what makes it work in traffic. The tempo sits down early and everybody just walks through it. Blakey, who is famous for lighting fires under people, plays it patient. Burrell keeps it clean. Donaldson and Brooks take their turns without trying to win anything.
Tina Brooks is worth stopping on. He made almost nothing under his own name and most of what he did record sat in the vault for decades. He is on the biggest track on one of the biggest organ records ever made and plenty of people still do not know the name. Go look him up after this.
Here is the part that hits harder in headphones than on speakers. There is no bass player on the date. Smith handles the bass line himself while soloing on top. In the car it sits right under everything and never gets in the way.
Side two is a different night and a different band. J.O.S. runs almost twelve minutes, from the 1957 session, with Morgan again plus George Coleman on alto, Eddie McFadden on guitar and Donald Bailey on drums. Then Flamingo, from the 1958 date, closes the record out. Two tracks, and that is the side.
So the math on a forty minute commute is easy. Side one gets you to the highway. Side two gets you the rest of the way and you park during Flamingo.
The record has a reputation as background music because organ jazz got labeled that way for years. It is not background music. It just refuses to be in a hurry, and people confuse those two things.
Also worth knowing, the companion record House Party came from these same two dates and actually came out first, in 1958. If you like this one, that is your next stop.
I keep coming back to how confident the whole thing is. Nobody in that ballroom was worried about holding your attention for twenty minutes. They just started playing.
Tina Brooks is the name to take away from all this. Go find out why he barely got to make records of his own.