Month: August 2025

Jimmy Smith, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Behind the frankly weird cover photo lurks a brilliant Jimmy Smith classic, featuring arrangements by Oliver Nelson and Claus Ogerman.

Album of the Week, August 16, 2025

I mentioned when writing about The Cat, Jimmy Smith’s 1964 Verve album with Lalo Schifrin, that it wasn’t his only album released for Verve that year. That might understate the weirdness of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? just a little bit. Not only did the album come the same year, and not only did it also pair the great jazz organist with a renowned composer/arranger (or two!), but the title songs for both records bear a certain… relationship to one another. In fact, as the late lamented Professor Peter Schickele would say, “The name of that relationship is identity.”

I’m not quite sure how it is that “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” and “The Cat” got to have an identical orchestral arrangement, but in other ways the two records, conceptually similar on paper, are very different. To begin with, The Cat is still an organ trio album, albeit with lots and lots of horns. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf is really an orchestral pop album with a jazz organ soloist. And it was arranged by two of the best. We’ve written about Claus Ogerman before, in his later work with Verve and Creed Taylor on Antônio Carlos Jobim’s Wave. And Oliver Nelson, who arranged the first side of the record, would be well known as a jazz composer and arranger even without a great 1961 album he cut with Creed Taylor on Impulse… but that’s a story for another time. Also joining, though not credited, were the same rhythm section as The Cat—George Duvivier on bass, Grady Tate on drums, and Kenny Burrell on guitar. Photographer Roy DeCarava is credited with the nightmarish cover; since he also photographed Miles’ version of Porgy and Bess, Bill Evans’ Conversations with Myself, and Branford Marsalis’ Renaissance, among other masterworks, we can only assume that someone put him up to it. The maker of the wolf’s head is uncredited.

“Slaughter on Tenth Avenue” opens the record with an expansive Oliver Nelson arrangement of the Richard Rodgers ballet score. There’s a lot going on in the first few seconds—intelligent use of lower brass and woodwinds, a pointillistic xylophone, thundering timpani. The tuba and low trombone give us an ominous introduction to Jimmy Smith stating the theme on the Hammond. And the horns give us the great chorus hook, the syncopated III – V – III – V – VI – V – III melody that then sets up Smith’s solo. This is where the arrangement really takes off, as it swings into a fast 6/8 that climbs into the stratosphere, pushing Smith to high riffs and flourishes as the orchestra plays the theme slowly behind him. The end seems to dissolve in spreading rings of dissonance as the timpani and drums beat louder and louder, until the orchestra finally brings us to closure with a diminished seventh chord. It’s quite a transition…

…into a very familiar theme. “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” (parts 1 and 2), composed by jazz pianist Don Kirkpatrick, opens with a version of the same flourish as “The Cat,” here treated with slightly more care and less mayhem than Lalo Schifrin’s arrangement. If Nelson’s arrangement and tempo takes some of the edge off the theme, Smith puts the edge right back. Indeed, though there are some fantastically crunchy chords from the orchestra, Part 1 seems at its best when it’s just the interchange between Smith, Burrell, and Tate. The orchestra seems invigorated by the long collective improvisation when they return, and Smith returns the favor, with a rippingly fast improvisation that takes it right up to the end. Part 2 is even more intriguing, with a bouncy drums and claves introduction leading into a trumpet statement of the theme, then a groovy solo turn by Smith that’s notable for how much space is left to appreciate that ongoing groove. Another wall of dissonance (one imagines Smith pulling out a bunch of stops and leaning on the keyboard) transitions into a more active solo with punctuation from the horns. As the second part draws to an end, it seems to circle back to something more like the Part 1 arrangement, closing with the full arrangement of the hook and one more high velocity solo, in a sort of ecstatic exhaustion.

“John Brown’s Body” gets a throbbing introduction from the low brass before Smith gives us an offbeat statement of the famous theme. There’s a little more air in this Claus Ogerman arrangement, with enough room around the brass for Kenny Burrell to contribute the occasional stab of a chord to move things along, then to play alongside as a sort of persistent Greek chorus. Grady Tate’s unshowy timekeeping is an understated star here; it’s only as he sneaks an occasional cymbal hit in around the edges that you really hear his steady genius at work. Ogerman brings the jam to a slow fade-out; you can imagine the band going on here ad infinitum.

“Wives and Lovers” returns us to a slow swing, with the melody stated in the winds, as Jimmy plays the Burt Bacharach melody down in the baritone range of the organ. This is a brief arrangement that is mostly about hearing Smith’s melodic imagination work its way around the brilliant Bacharach chords; Ogerman seems content to fade this one out, perhaps to get to “Women of the World” faster. This sixties pop groover by Riziero Ortolani is given a samba backbeat by Grady Tate, but seems to circle around the melody without much motion. Smith makes the most of the slim material, accelerating into a faster tempo in the midst of his solo and urging the percussionists and Tate to follow, before drawing it to a mantra-like close.

“Bluesette” closes us out with a swinging rendition of the 1962 Toots Thielemans hit. Jimmy keeps the solo in a slightly higher register, perhaps to echo Thielemans’ whistling melody, as he rips into an extended solo following the brief orchestral introduction. Tate and Burrell cook right along with him through the improvisation. When the orchestra comes back in, they take us to a coda of sorts, staying suspended on a minor third to fourth riff as Jimmy heads right off into infinity.

There’s no disputing that the work Smith did with Nelson and Ogerman, as well as Lalo Schifrin, expanded his sound; there are some purists who would use a more pejorative verb in that sentence. But as we’ve heard, there are pleasures to be had from the combination of the well-crafted arrangements with Smith’s impeccable organ playing. Incredibly, this album and The Cats weren’t the only two albums the incredibly prolific Smith recorded in 1964; they were perhaps not even the best-known of those albums. But we’re going to save his last 1964 selection for another time. Next week will find us with an album from the following year that saw him returning to a more familiar configuration, with spectacular results.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

BONUS: Here’s Smith playing the title track live in 1965 with Quentin Warren on guitar and Billy Hart on drums:

BONUS BONUS: Following its release on this album, “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” was covered by a variety of artists, including this memorable instrumental cover by James Brown’s band, with none other than Brown himself at the keys:

Jimmy Smith, The Cat

Jimmy Smith’s soulful Hammond B3 meets the ingenious arrangements of Lalo Schifrin in this hot album for Verve.

Album of the Week, August 9, 2025

There’s a world in which Jimmy Smith kept making cool, soulful organ trio and quartet albums like Prayer Meetin’ for his whole career. In that world, we’d be listening to a lot more laid back small combo jazz with Smith’s impeccable harmonic sense to lend a little excitement. But that’s not the world we live in. Shortly after he recorded last week’s session for Blue Note, Smith moved to Verve Records, and before long he began recording a series of records that dramatically broadened what the jazz organ could do, in collaboration with two mad geniuses of jazz… one of whom we’ve met before.

1962 was the prime of Creed Taylor’s years as jazz impresario at Verve. We’ve told the story of his post-Verve years in the history of his own label CTI, starting with his late-1960s collaboration with Antonio Carlos Jobim, Wave (and you can find the rest of that series, along with my other writings, in the Album of the Week archives). In the early 1960s, he was still experimenting with some of the ingredients that would come to define his CTI sound, especially the combination of jazz musicians with imaginative orchestral arrangements. In this case, the arrangements came courtesy of Argentine-American pianist/composer/arranger/conductor Lalo Schifrin.

Schifrin, who passed away earlier this year, had done some arranging for Dizzy Gillespie’s big band, and came to New York to join Dizzy’s small group; he went on to a notable career in film and television composing, including the themes for Mission: Impossible, Mannix, Cool Hand Luke, Dirty Harry, and Enter the Dragon. Taylor put Schifrin with Jimmy Smith, and Schifrin formed a jazz orchestra for the album that included the likes of Thad Jones and Snooky Young on trumpet, Urbie Green on trombone, Don Butterfield on tuba, and a rock solid trio of Grady Tate on drums, George Duvivier on bass, and Kenny Burrell on guitar. Thad Jones, the middle of the Jones brothers (elder brother Hank, younger brother Elvin), started his career with Count Basie, formed a long-running orchestra with Mel Lewis, and transformed the Danish Radio Big Band into one of the finest in the world before taking over leadership of the Count Basie band in 1985. Snooky Young had played in the Thad Jones/Mel Lewis band but was best known for his work in the Tonight Show band under Doc Severinson. Butterfield was a great session player who had performed with Dizzy, Sinatra, Mingus, and Rahsaan Roland Kirk. Duvivier worked with a Who’s Who of musicians including Bud Powell, Oliver Nelson, Sinatra, and a few others that we’ll come across in the weeks to come. And Kenny Burrell, who is still kicking at 94, played with everyone as well as leading his own great sessions on Blue Note, Prestige and Columbia.

“Theme from Joy House” is the first of two Schifrin film soundtrack compositions on the album. The French thriller, starring Jane Fonda among others, has a bonkers plot, and Schifrin apparently responded with a bonkers score. The orchestration builds from bass and percussion, with a subdued organ part playing the main theme as the lower horns provide support. Then the trumpets blare and we’re truly off to the races. The second verse gives us the melody in the horns, with bursts of vibraphone providing punctuation. Smith’s solo, unlike his combo work, stays mostly in the upper ranges of the organ, the better to play against the wall of horns. But we still get some of his trademarks, like leaning on the tonic to build suspense—here echoed in Schifrin’s arrangement by the horns. The final repetition is a full on horn blast, with Smith’s high organ tone cutting through.

The title track, “The Cat” is the second Schifrin selection, also from Joy House. In form it’s a blues, but in spirit it belongs alongside Quincy Jones’ “Soul Bossa Nova” (aka the Austin Powers theme) as an exemplar of the most bonkers kind of ’60s instrumental pop. Schifrin doesn’t spend much time warming up to his theme; we get four syncopated eighth notes of introduction, blasted from the horns, and then the bass (and tuba?) and guitar are off to the races, with Smith’s easy statement of the melody soon yielding to high arpeggios. You could easily imagine this one soundtracking a manic chase scene, especially when the horns return to play the theme over some of Smith’s more wild improvisations. Smith takes the lead in the bridge, with bubbling tremolos building up to a reprise of the melody. The full band shuffles to the fade-out, led particularly by Grady Tate’s drumming, replete with well placed tom hits and cymbals. The tune clocks in a few seconds shy of 3:30, but packs quite a wallop; it’s deservingly the best-known cut from the album and I would have known it even if KEXP hadn’t regularly played it under their DJs reading concert calendar listings when I lived in the Seattle suburbs.

The classic “Basin Street Blues” is another one that starts deceptively coolly, before the horns burst over organ, bass, and low vibraphone like fireworks, but this track keeps its cool a little longer, and ultimately settles into a pocket, with the horns acting mostly as a high chorus that briefly kick Smith into a sort of higher orbit. Ultimately they draw him out into a more extroverted solo that leans into the higher range of the instrument and arpeggios up and down the keyboard, as the middle and low horns state the melody and finally the whole band blasts the chorus. Their part done, the horns retreat to providing emphatic punctuation at the edges of Smith’s final solo, before coming back for a wild climax, full of diminished sevenths and razzmatazz.

“Main Title from the Carpetbaggers,” a theme by Elmer Bernstein and Ray Colcord for the 1964 drama starring George Peppard and Alan Ladd, starts with Latin percussion, then the double bass enters in triple meter before the tuba starts doubling. The horns state the theme with much growling from the trombones and tuba over a consistent pounding on the tom (or possibly even timpani). Finally, after two iterations of the melody, Smith enters on the organ, riffing on the blue notes in the melody as Phil Kraus’s congas and Grady Tate’s drums propel the melody forward. The horns provide accents over the top, but this is mostly Jimmy Smith and his rhythm section, smoking along the slow burn of the piece—at least until Schifrin’s magnificent French horn section (four horns, including Jimmy Buffington, who played on Miles Ahead and Sketches of Spain) blasts off. The work ends as it began with the horns playing through the melody, but this time Smith is wailing alongside the full band.

“Chicago Serenade,” starting off the B side of the record, is by the great Eddie Harris, who also wrote “Freedom Jazz Dance,” later recorded by Miles on Miles Smiles. There’s little of the rhythmic complexity of the latter piece here, but some great pop sensibility in the tune, here stated in Kenny Burrell’s guitar with accents from Jimmy and the horns. Jimmy plays a high flourish on the organ to transition out from the horns but brings his solo down into the baritone range, providing a more intimate sound. There’s some great antiphonal writing for the horns throughout, and some magnificent French horn playing, but the crunchy organ arpeggio at the end is by itself worth the price of admission here.

W.C. Handy’s classic “St. Louis Blues” gets a swift intro from Jimmy, Tate and Duvivier that makes it sound like the band was already cooking when Rudy Van Gelder started rolling the tape. The horns can do little else than punch up the chorus; Jimmy is on fire, shifting meter and tonality and insinuating the melody under the band. The horns finally find their footing at the very end, giving a rousing send off, but Jimmy’s rolled chords get the last word, as always.

“Delon’s Blues” is the one Jimmy Smith original on the record, and it’s much more relaxed, but still tightly arranged, with accents first from Burrell and then from the horns over Jimmy’s melody. The more spacious arrangement of the verse gives us an opportunity to hear what Grady Tate is doing to punch up the rhythm under everything, with syncopated punches and stumbling rolls on the snare for interest. Throughout Burrell drops little zingers to keep things lively.

The final blues, Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer’s “Blues in the Night,” picks up with just guitar, drums and bass accompanying Smith’s introduction. When the horns come in, they lean on a weary suspension to emphasize the blue notes. Tate and Smith threaten to bring things to a boil on the introduction, but they keep the heat to a simmer, letting Burrell provide textural interest. Finally three pounded beats from Tate tip things over and the horns take a high screaming chorus. Smith lowers the temperature once more to a fast simmer, again racing his tremolo across a whole verse as the band vamps. The engineer sadly fades out just as Smith’s solo gets interesting, but we are left with the impression that the blues continue forever.

In the team from Verve, Smith had found collaborators who could take his basic brilliance and turn up the dials on all the arrangements without compromising the basic elegance of his vision for the organ’s role in jazz. As at Blue Note, he made a series of records in quick succession for Verve; unlike at Blue Note, these charted. His last Blue Note albums cracked the Billboard 200, but The Cat went all the way to Number 12 on the album chart, and “The Cat” cracked the Hot 100, finishing at # 67. His other 1964 release would also perform well, albeit with a very different collaborator; we’ll hear that one next time.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

BONUS: Jimmy would take this material on the road with a smaller combo. Here’s an undated performance for German TV with just drums and guitar (and a tenor sax player who sits this one out), burning on “The Cat”:

Jimmy Smith, Prayer Meetin’

Jimmy Smith and Stanley Turrentine take us to school in this coolly soulful recording from the organist’s years on Blue Note.

Album of the Week, August 2, 2025

This week starts a new series of posts about the records in my collection, and this time instead of concentrating on one player (or a group of related musicians) we’ll be listening to different takes on the same instrument – the organ.

I’ve long been a fan of the jazz organ sound, which I featured in an episode of Exfiltration Radio (in which you’ll hear a few of the tracks we’ll write about), and have sought out and found quite a few of its proponents. But today we’ll begin at the beginning, because you can’t talk about the jazz organ—namely, the Hammond B-3 organ—without talking about Jimmy Smith.

Like so much else in jazz, the jazz organ trio came about through a combination of technology, economics, and genius. The Hammond Organ Company had begun selling their electric organs to churches that couldn’t afford a traditional pipe organ, but gradually jazz players started adopting the instrument because of the richness of sound that could be produced, and jazz clubs started booking organ trios (with drum and guitar) because they were cheaper than larger combos but produced a bigger sound than piano trios. And Jimmy Smith, born in the Philadelphia suburb of Norristown in 1928, started exploring the sound of the instrument after honing his chops in the Royal Hamilton School of Music and the Leo Ornstein School of Music, and after several years playing boogie-woogie piano. He spent the latter half of the 1950s and the early 1960s recording for Blue Note, taping 40 sessions in eight years. The last of these studio sessions, recorded in early 1963 and released in 1964, was Prayer Meetin’, an organ trio with Quentin Warren on guitar and regular drummer Donald Bailey, plus the tenor saxophone of Stanley Turrentine.

“Prayer Meeting,” one of two Smith originals on the album, gives us a meeting between the two leads as they take each other to church. The composition is a blues that’s also a showcase for Stanley Turrentine. After the laid back blues of the intro, he’s on fire—tossing off syncopated licks, firing off little moans in the high register, playing against the offbeat chords from Smith. Smith’s solo gives us that classic Jimmy Smith organ tone, made by pulling the first three drawbars all the way out (equivalent to setting the 16 foot, 5 1/3 foot, and 8 foot stops on a pipe organ). He starts by playing a countermelody against the accompaniment of guitar and drums, and then he starts preaching—he leans into the blue note for multiple measures, starts improvising in runs of full chords, gives a tremolo on chords for multiple measures, accentuated by a tossed-off arpeggio…  Turrentine’s closing solo on the melody is faded out; one wonders how much longer the duo could have gone on improvising like this.

“I Almost Lost My Mind,” originally a 1950 R&B hit by Ivory Joe Hunter, opens with Turrentine and Smith playing the melody in three part harmony. Where the chart-topping single keeps a burner going under the slow melody with blues guitar licks, here it’s Donald Bailey’s implacable drumbeat that gives us the forward momentum as Turrentine swoons deep into the blues. Quentin Warren’s guitar keeps the chords moving under the first solo, freeing Smith to simmer under the saxophonist and hit rippling accents. When Turrentine’s solo comes to an end, the simmering organ cooks harder, with dashes of heat against the melody and another hard “lean” on the left hand across eight bars with a right hand tremolo. But it doesn’t shout; throughout, the band keeps it cool, even as Warren takes a clean, note-bending solo in the last two verses before the recap.

“Stone Cold Dead in the Market,” by Trinidadian musician Wilmouth Houdini, was originally made famous by Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Jordan in 1946 in a West Indies accented performance. Here Bailey’s subtle bossa nova and the syncopation of the players carries the Trinidadian flavor without the murderous undertones of the original lyrics.

“When the Saints Go Marching In” surely needs no introduction, and the players go right into it, with Smith playing the melody while Warren and Turrentine play a riff (in parallel fifths!) underneath. Here Smith and Bailey, especially, take the lid off, with the organist leaning into melodic improvisation over a bubbling backbeat from the drummer. Smith seems likely to go at this all day until Turrentine steps up to the plate, playing a continuous stream of eighth notes that swing hard against the groove established by the organ, drums and guitar. Smith picks it right back up after Turrentine steps back for another verse, and the combo cooks right down to the end (sadly faded out).

“Red Top,” a tune by soul-jazz saxophonist Gene Ammons, starts out with Stanley Turrentine doing what he did best over dark chords from Smith. It seems like a straightforward blues number, but the scampering syncopation from Turrentine on the first improvisation verse and the leaned-into subtonic by both Turrentine and Smith across eight bars of the second verse signal that there’s some playful strangeness at work beneath the surface. The descending chromatic chords under Smith’s later solo reinforce the playfulness, as does the trading of thoughts between saxophonist and organist in the final verses as the tune fades out.

“Picnickin’” gives us one last Smith original to go out on. This one is a blues by way of Broadway, and Turrentine swaggers up to the melody in his solo to signal that this one will go hard. Both Turrentine and Smith lean into the blues, but Turrentine shows off some of his rapid-fire chromatic work alongside the blues licks. Smith builds anticipation through repetition of suspended chords and the seventh, holding the leading tone for four to eight measures at a time in a favored trick from this session. The conclusion leads us out with the players reprising the melody in parallel fifths once more.

Prayer Meetin’ is a fair representation of Smith’s Blue Note recordings—deeply grooving, soulful, but always with a cool structure at its core. That signature sound was about to change as Smith parted ways with Blue Note for another label, known for jazz but also for stretching the boundaries of the music as it rubbed up against other styles. We’ll hear a prime example next time.

You can listen to this week’s album, with bonus tracks included on the CD reissue, here: