Month: September 2025

Jimmy Smith, Respect

Even on an album that seeks to hitch a ride on Aretha Franklin’s rising star, Jimmy Smith brings the heat and some incredibly funky originals.

Album of the Week, September 13, 2025

When you’re Jimmy Smith, making two or three albums a year, sometimes you make masterpieces, and sometimes you make a party album that doesn’t have a huge impact on the musical world, but is fun to listen to anyway. Respect follows two huge releases from Jimmy and guitarist Wes Montgomery (we’ve written about some of the latter’s later work before). With a title like Respect the motivation for the album is pretty clear, recorded as it was not two months after Aretha Franklin’s hit, but it also has some excellent Jimmy originals. It might not quite reach the heights of Organ Grinder Swing or The Cat, but Jimmy Smith was incapable of phoning in a record date, as this hot session shows.

The album was recorded on June 2 and June 14, 1967 at Rudy Van Gelder’s studio in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey. One session featured Smith’s long-time drummer, Grady Tate, alongside Eric Gale on guitar and the redoubtable Ron Carter on bass. The other had funky drummer Bernard Purdie with Thornel Schwartz on guitar and Bob Bushnell on bass. Regarding the two guitarists, we’ve reviewed some of the work Gale did alongside George Benson, Yusef Lateef and Freddie Hubbard on CTI. Schwartz made a career out of playing in jazz organ combos, working alongside Johnny “Hammond” Smith, Jimmy McGriff, and “Groove” Holmes, about all of whom more later. And Bob Bushnell had a widely varied career, playing on many Verve and Impulse releases, as well as dubbing the bass part on the “electric” hit version of Simon and Garfunkel’s “The Sound of Silence.”

“Mercy, Mercy, Mercy” is the song for which Joe Zawinul would have been known best, had he not gone on to work with Miles and to found Weather Report. The tune, which he wrote when he was in Cannonball Adderley’s band in 1966, was a hit, going to #2 on the Billboard Soul Chart and all the way to #11 on the Hot 100. Jimmy’s version grooves along in the same relaxed pocket as the original, coming off the simmer with the groove of Bernard Purdie’s funky drumming even before Jimmy starts his solo. Schwartz and Bushnell keep it in the soulful side of things as the band makes its relaxed way through the tune, accompanied by a fair amount of studio chatter from Jimmy.

“Respect” had burned up the charts just months before Smith went into the studio to record these sessions. The 1965 Otis Redding original had been gender-flipped in Aretha Franklin’s burning cover version, released on April 10, 1967, and had spent two weeks atop the Billboard Pop Singles Chart and 10 weeks on the Black Singles Chart. Schwartz and Purdie bring some of the insouciance of the Aretha version to the opening here, and Jimmy’s improvisation blends aspects of both Aretha’s blazing solo vocals and the backing vocals, so brilliantly sung by her sisters Emma and Carolyn that the liner notes for Smith’s album by A.B. Spellman incorrectly assume that Aretha had dubbed her own voice for the back-up part. “Respect” was clearly recorded for single release; it fades out after 2:12, just as Jimmy seems to be getting warmed up!

“Funky Broadway,” a Smith original, is backed by the Carter/Tate/Gale combo, and is an interesting evolution in Smith’s writing. Where many of the originals we’ve heard from him so far have been blues or loose jams, “Funky Broadway” is a tight groove with a slinky guitar line over Ron Carter’s reliable heartbeat, with Eric Gale and Smith taking turns playing syncopated diminished seventh chords under each others’ solos. The whole thing is a pretty magnificent exercise in James Brown-style funk. Smith calls out “Funky Broadway” at the end, I suspect naming the seven-minute-long jam for posterity.

“T-Bone Steak” is the second Jimmy original here, again with the Carter/Gale/Tate group, and we’re back in the twelve-bar blues. But it’s hard to complain about Jimmy returning to this particular well, since he jumps immediately into the deep end from the first notes of his solo. The double-speed runs followed by the hemiola, followed again by his leaning on the tonic for 36 bars or so as he rips improvisation after improvisation, might be some of the hottest, most concentrated brilliance he recorded. Grady Tate sounds a bit like Bernard Purdie here with the power of his hits on the tom, though not with his rhythmic approach.

“Get Out of My Life, Woman” closes the record, with Jimmy yelling, “Ow! Get out my life!” at the top as the band begins the Allen Touissant/Lee Dorsey standard. Here they play it as a tight New Orleans blues—a blues with more than a hint of shuffle underneath. The guitarist (I think this is Schwartz, Purdie and Bushnell, though without credits it’s hard to tell) unreels a steady, controlled funk throughout his solo, leaving Smith to take the lid off the pot as it hits the boil. The track finishes with Smith and the guitarist exchanging ideas right into the fade-out, as if reluctant to let the jam end.

I haven’t talked about the album’s cover so far, mostly because it nonplussed me, but apparently Smith was, in fact, a karate aficionado. In an excerpt from Bill Milkowski’s Rockers, Jazzbos and Visionaries, Smith said he had been into karate for about 25 years and responded to Milkowski calling his gi a “kung fu outfit”: “Not kung fu, motherf–. That’s shotokan. And that means sho-kill-yo’-a–. I studied that particular method.” What is clear is that, even on a collection of mostly R&B covers designed to hit the charts, Jimmy’s playing remains as intense and vital as on the more significant albums in his discography. The commercial success of his work—the album hit Number 60 on the Billboard 200, spending 20 weeks on the chart—continued to attract others to the Hammond, and we’ll hear from another of those players next week.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

BONUS: Here’s a live rendition of “Mercy, Mercy, Mercy” in medley with “Country Preacher” by Cannonball Adderley’s band from 1970 , with Zawinul on the Fender Rhodes:

Brother Jack McDuff, Hot Barbeque

A deceptively skillful romp through Latin-tinged soul jazz, with jaw-dropping moments hidden inside.

Album of the Week, September 6, 2025

We’ve heard how Jimmy Smith pioneered the jazz organ trio, and how his sound evolved from the earliest days into his brilliantly orchestrated works for Verve, all without losing the brilliance of the fundamental sound of the instrument. His approach to the instrument drew fans, and also other musicians who put their own spin on the jazz organ. One such player was “Brother” Jack McDuff.

McDuff, born Eugene McDuffy in Champaign, Illinois in 1926, started out playing the bass in an early incarnation of Joe Farrell’s band, but switched to organ at the suggestion of tenor saxophonist Willis “Gator” Jackson. Jazz organists were rare in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and Blue Note had Jimmy Smith sewn up at the time, so the young McDuff must have been a draw for labels looking to capitalize on the sound. He ultimately landed at Prestige, where he played with Grant Green, Sonny Stitt, Gene Ammon and others. By 1963 he pulled together a quartet with Red Holloway on tenor saxophone, Joe Dukes on drums, and a 19-year-old Pittsburgh based guitarist named George Benson, who made his debut with the McDuff band. Holloway was a versatile saxophonist from Helena, Arkansas who had played with Yusef Lateef, Dexter Gordon, and Billie Holiday, but also with R&B and blues acts like Willie Dixon, B.B. King, Aretha Franklin, Junior Parker, and Etta James. Joe Dukes, born 1937 in Memphis, played for most of his career with McDuff, but also recorded sessions with Idris Muhammad and Lonnie Smith. And we’ve written about George Benson before.

“Hot Barbecue” opens in an unexpected place, with a samba rhythm and the band shouting out “Hot barbecue… today!” before proceeding into an extended blues. The point of departure for the brisk McDuff original appears to be Smith’s The Cat; there is some of the same rhythmic drive in Benson’s guitar and the drum part, and in Holloway’s solo, which has more than a little boogaloo about it. Benson’s solo, by comparison, is economically funky; both players only get one verse. If you had your eyes closed, you’d be hard pressed to tell the difference between McDuff’s approach on the organ and Smith’s, though the former leans more into expressive runs where the latter tends to favor suspensions. For this song McDuff even uses the Smith tone, which involves pulling out the first three drawbars on the “B” preset on the top manual of the organ, giving a rich, bluesy sound. But where Smith might have jammed on this fun tune for a while, McDuff is in and out in only three minutes.

By contrast, “The Party’s Over” demonstrates a completely different tone, with McDuff playing the melody on a high flute-like setting. The Camden/Green/Styne classic here gets an amiable, ambling treatment, with McDuff and Holloway playing chordal stabs in unison as if to suggest an entire horn section. Benson’s solo keeps to his trademark clean tone while still taking opportunities to elaborate the harmonies. Dukes trades eights with the rest of the band, and McDuff takes two high solo verses and leans into a fade-out.

We’re back into a Latin influence for the fast-driving “Briar Patch,” a sort of soul rhumba that gives Benson and Holloway the opening melodic statement in parallel fifths and sixths before McDuff takes a quick solo on the tonic and the blues note. Benson’s solo is noteworthy here, a casually whipped-off flurry of triple and syncopated meter. The tag is punctuated by exclamations from the organ, and again we’re in a fade-out.

Tempos are considerably more relaxed for “Hippy Dip,” but don’t be fooled; the chromatic descending bit in the second half of the theme will make you sit up straight and grab your headphones. By the time we come back around to the chromatic ascent at the end, you might be saying “What the heck was that?” This is a lot more than the casual soul jazz that we’ve heard so far, and the changes keep things interesting throughout the solos, with Holloway suggesting a little Cannonball Adderley in his approach. Benson’s cooler approach is deceptive, as he rips off a set of ascending tones that show his mind at work. McDuff leans into the tonal shifts with such abandon that you can be forgiven if you lose track of what key we’re in. This McDuff original is one that should be in rotation more, but relatively few acts have covered it. (Though “few” is not “none”; see below.)

“601 1/2 North Poplar” takes us back into an animated boogaloo, with a a fierce group chorus and a fiery Benson solo to start things off. Holloway’s solo roots around in the corners of the soul kitchen and takes us down into the basement before McDuff fires up the afterburner, leaning hard on the submediant for an entire two verses as he rips improvisation after improvisation. The band repeats the descending line from the theme into the fade-out.

Arthur Hamilton’s “Cry Me a River” is introduced by Benson harmonizing with Holloway, with punctuation by McDuff. This is clearly Holloway’s show, though, and he gives us a deeply soulful run through the melody before turning it over to McDuff. Brother Jack takes some rhythmic liberties as he leans into the crying corners of the song, and continues to give little shouts at the edges of the outro. The band takes a breath and launches into “The Three Day Thang,” which reads like an uptempo version of some of the chromatic edges of “Hippy Dip” but is really a fast blues. McDuff is on fire throughout his solo, taking off some of the restraint that characterizes the rest of the record. The group leans into a suspension to finish.

Hot Barbeque, with its rib-eating cover and Latin intro, sets itself up as a casual piece of soul jazz. But the expressively restrained solos and, especially, harmonic sophistication of the performance belie that first impression. Brother Jack had a lot on his mind, and the album is a memorable subversion of the organ combo genre. When we hear from him again, he will have subverted it even further. Next week, though, we’ll check in on how Jimmy Smith was evolving along with the 1960s.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

BONUS: Here’s a live performance of McDuff’s quartet from the RTF Festival in France in 1964, just a year or so before this album was recorded:

BONUS BONUS: While my dreams of a full-on “Hippy Dip” revival may be in vain, there are a few pretty good modern covers out there, including this one by a quintet led by guitarist Sam Dunn here: