On February 25, 1958, Blue Note recorded Jimmy Smith in the ballroom of the Manhattan Towers Hotel in New York rather than at Rudy Van Gelder's studio, with Van Gelder engineering and Alfred Lion producing. Two different groups worked with Smith that day. One was his trio partners, Eddie McFadden on guitar and Donald Bailey on drums, with Lou Donaldson sitting in on alto. The other was a six-piece band: Smith on organ, Lee Morgan on trumpet, Donaldson on alto, Tina Brooks on tenor, Kenny Burrell on guitar and Art Blakey on drums. Jazzdisco.org lists four tunes from that band, with take numbers running from 12 to 15, and the last of them, take 15, is a slow blues of Smith's called "The Sermon." It runs twenty minutes and twelve seconds, and when Blue Note finally released The Sermon!, BLP 4011, it took up the entire first side.
Van Gelder's own studio at that point was the living room of his parents' house at 25 Prospect Avenue in Hackensack, New Jersey, a house built with the idea that it would double as a recording room. He did not move to his new facility in Englewood Cliffs until July 1959. Both sessions that went into The Sermon! were made at the Manhattan Towers, the first one on August 25, 1957, and the second on that February day in 1958.
Smith was from Norristown, Pennsylvania. He was doing a song-and-dance routine with his father in clubs by the age of six, and at nine he won a Philadelphia radio talent contest as a boogie-woogie pianist. He started working on the Hammond organ in 1951 and switched to it for good in 1954, after hearing Wild Bill Davis. In his liner notes for this album, Ira Gitler tells how the pianist Freddie Redd came back from Philadelphia excited about him, and how "Alfred Lion heard Jimmy and translated his reaction swiftly into action." Smith began recording for Blue Note in 1956 and made around forty sessions for the label over eight years before signing with Verve in 1962.
Those Manhattan Towers dates were productive in a way that shows how Lion worked. The August 1957 session produced eight tunes with a rotating cast: Morgan, the trombonist Curtis Fuller and George Coleman on alto, with McFadden and Burrell sharing the guitar chair and Bailey on drums throughout. The February 1958 session added the band with Donaldson, Brooks and Blakey. Lion spread the results across several records. "Just Friends" and "Blues After All" from August, and "Au Privave" and "Lover Man" from February, became House Party, BLP 4002, which came out in 1958. Other tunes waited for later LPs and compact discs. The Sermon! drew one track from August and two from February, and Wikipedia dates its release to December 1959, almost two years after the title track was recorded.
The title track is a twelve-bar blues, and Gitler notes that Smith dedicated it to Horace Silver. According to Gitler, Smith "not only carries the theme but furthers the mood-setting by taking the first solo," and he credits "the solid foundation supplied by Art Blakey" with the groove. Burrell follows with what Gitler hears as a clear-voiced, singing solo. Brooks takes the longest solo on the track. Donaldson's builds to a double-time climax, and Morgan is heard later in the piece. To my ears nobody rushes on this thing. The tempo sits down early and everybody walks through it, Blakey plays it patient, Burrell keeps it clean, and Donaldson and Brooks take their turns without trying to win anything.
Not everyone heard it that way at the time. Reviewing the album in Down Beat on March 3, 1960, and giving it three stars, the magazine's reviewer wrote that on the title track "the tempo rushes quite noticeably," with Blakey and Smith seeming to fight over it most of the way, and he said Brooks "takes so many choruses he starts to repeat himself." He found much of the first side's blowing "pretty run of the mill." Writing in the San Bernardino County Sun that January, Jim Angelo called the album "a blues-based, down-to-earth swinger."
Morgan was nineteen. He was born in Philadelphia on July 10, 1938, joined Dizzy Gillespie's big band at eighteen, and had been recording for Blue Note since 1956. Later in 1958 he joined Blakey's Jazz Messengers, and Gitler places him in the line of Clifford Brown. On "The Sermon" he sounds like he has nowhere to be.
Tina Brooks deserves the most attention of anyone in that ballroom. He was born Harold Floyd Brooks in Fayetteville, North Carolina, on June 7, 1932, and Gitler introduced him to Blue Note's buyers as a "young wailer" from the Bronx who had grown a personal style out of his debts to Sonny Rollins and Hank Mobley. Three weeks after "The Sermon," on March 16, 1958, he recorded his own album for the label, Minor Move. It was not released until 1980. He led five Blue Note sessions in all, one of them shared with Jackie McLean, and only True Blue, recorded June 25, 1960, came out while he was alive. He worked as McLean's understudy in Jack Gelber's play The Connection, did not record after 1961, and, after years of heroin dependency and failing health, died of liver failure in New York on August 13, 1974, at forty-two. He is on the biggest track of one of the biggest organ records ever made, and plenty of people who own it still do not know his name.
There is no bass player on either date. Smith covers the bass himself while he plays everything else, and the general accounts of his technique say he used the bass pedals for walking lines on ballads and the lower manual for faster tunes, with the pedals adding attack to certain notes. The sources do not agree on exactly how he handled it on this particular record, so I will leave it at that. In the car the bass sits right under everything and never gets in the way.
Side two is a different night and a different band. "J.O.S." runs 11:56 and comes from the August 1957 session, with Morgan, George Coleman on alto, McFadden on guitar and Bailey on drums. Gitler calls it "a minor-key, rapid original by Jimmy" and gives Coleman "the swift lead-off solo." The Down Beat reviewer found Coleman's solo a bit long but called Morgan's the gassiest moment on the album, and noticed Smith using an organ sound like a buzzer to signal the end of each solo. Then "Flamingo," the Edmund Anderson and Ted Grouya ballad, closes the record at 8:02. It comes from the February 1958 band without Donaldson and Brooks, take 14, cut just before "The Sermon." Gitler calls it "the beautiful Flamingo," with Morgan as the main soloist, and even Down Beat allowed that "the irrepressible Morgan, along with a relaxed Burrell, get some nice things going on Flamingo."
This is a record I play on the way to work, and it suits a weekday morning for a simple reason. Skipping is a decision, and at seven in the morning you do not want decisions. You want to press play once and leave it alone, and a slow blues that runs twenty minutes does that better than a record full of four-minute tunes. On a forty-minute commute the math is easy: side one gets me to the highway, side two gets me the rest of the way, and I park during "Flamingo."
Blue Note also put "The Sermon" out on a 45, catalog 45-1879, which meant cutting a twenty-minute performance down to single length. Organ jazz got labeled background music for years, and this record gets filed with it. It is not background music, and its pace is a choice. Nobody in that ballroom was worried about holding your attention for twenty minutes. They played the blues for as long as it had something to say, and Blue Note put the whole thing on one side.