Music – Page 2 – Jarrett House North

Jimmy Smith, Root Down

Root down, and get it, with this milestone live recording by the master and a young band with connections to the Jackson 5, Motown and Quincy Jones.

Album of the Week, October 18, 2o25

When last we heard from Jimmy Smith, he had just started to build a new trio after years of relative stability with Grady Tate. During the late 1960s and early 1970s the personnel for his bands continued to change, and his live sets continued to blow minds even as his recorded work continued in the same groove it always had. But a live session from February 1972 went to new heights and effectively immortalized him for a later generation.

As we’ve heard, even famously conservative labels like Blue Note were leaning harder into the jazz-funk stream. Jimmy had always had a healthy dollop of R&B in his sound, but the band of younger players he brought to the Bombay Bicycle Club on February 8, 1972 went much farther in that direction. Drummer Paul Humphrey had played sessions with Wes Montgomery, bluesman Mel Brown, Quincy Jones, Merry Clayton, and organists “Groove” Holmes and Charles Kynard. Wilton Felder was a founding member fo the Jazz Crusaders who had played bass on the Jackson 5’s “I Want You Back” and “ABC.” Conga player Buck Clarke had performed with Les McCann, Willis Jackson and Cannonball Adderley. And guitarist Arthur Adams had performed with Quincy Jones, the Jackson 5, the Crusaders, and others, as well as releasing his own material as a leader with Motown. The band were steeped in funk and soul, and just as the arrival of the Collins brothers had turbocharged James Brown’s funky side a year earlier, the young collaborators did incredible things for Jimmy’s sound that night.

Paul Humphrey, Wilton Felder, and Buck Clarke begin with a fierce rhythm over which Adams begins to lay down a scratch guitar line as Jimmy plays the opening lick and descending chromatic chords of “Sagg Shootin’ His Arrow.” Adams gets the first solo, making heavy use of a wah-wah pedal to alter the sound. Jimmy’s solo uses sustained tones over which he plays a frantically fast organ part; as Adams keeps going with sustained tension on a minor third in the mid-range of the guitar, Jimmy keeps his solo higher so that it can be better heard above the band. When Adams drops back to the funk “scratch” effect, Jimmy drops an octave, but not for long as his intense energy continues to drive his solo forward. Note: the version of the tune linked above is the unedited version from the 2000 reissue of the album. The original LP has a seven-minute edit instead.

“For Everyone Under the Sun,” written by Peter Chase, kicks off with a mellower introduction, but Jimmy brings an enormous amount of energy to even this ballad, with the melodic line rolling like waves. Arthur Adams takes a brief solo but then it’s back to Jimmy. He embellishes almost every line with rolling chords, blue flourishes, and secondary melodies; the ideas seem to just pour forth. If his studio solos were sometimes predictable on earlier albums, here he’s anything but.

“After Hours” is a deeply bluesy original that starts with just Humphrey and Felder backing up a triple-time rolling blues solo by Jimmy. Steve Williams, who seems to have just been hanging around the club, gives a few licks on the harmonica that serve mostly as color underneath both Jimmy and Adams; this track is his sole recording credit (Discogs thinks otherwise, but I doubt he’s the same Steve Williams on that 2009 Australian blues record). Buck Clarke gets a feature alongside Jimmy on his second solo, his polyrhythmic hits helping to fan the fire already burning under Jimmy’s solo as the organist leans into the tonic as a drone under his solo. The band leans into the slow blues at the close, at what must have been the break in the set (and the end of Side 1); the audience in the club is audible in their appreciation.

Side 2 opens with “Root Down (And Get It),” which is to say it opens with Felder. His opening note on the bass is a slide into the tonic an octave up, followed by a bluesy descent down to the subtonic an octave down. The theme on the bass: subtonic to repeated tonic, subtonic to repeated tonic, up to a minor third, at the lowest reach of the bass, is some seriously, deeply stanky funk all by itself. When Humphrey hits a series of syncopated beats on the tom and snare, it builds to a rhythm that immediately has the audience clapping along. Arthur Adams arrives with a deeply wah-wah’d, scratched intro, the congas percolate along, and Jimmy’s organ plays mostly on the tonic and subtonic, laying into a funky groove that builds up to rising chromatic chords. Structurally we’re in twelve-bar blues land, but artistically speaking we are in some deep funk. What makes “Root Down” more funky than “Sagg Shootin’ His Arrow”? In my mind it’s the space in the arrangement. “Sagg” feels frantic, almost overloaded, like the band has something to prove, but “Root Down” breathes even as it consistently, insistently circles back to those rising chords. The moment late in the song where the players drop back and you can hear just Humphrey and Buck Clarke’s rhythm is magic.

The band rolls right into “Let’s Stay Together”; the Al Green song must have been on many minds, considering its cover on Two Headed Freap last week. Jimmy’s solo here is exuberant and extroverted, and the band’s hard backbeat and groove make this version one to listen to. If the beat is relaxed here, it is only in preparation for its double time recapitulation of the opening number, retitled “Slow Down Sagg.” Here Arthur Adams takes a walk down Main Street in Funkytown, both in his solo and in his accompaniment of Jimmy’s frantically Terpsichorean boogie. Paul Humphrey gets his moment in the spotlight, as do both Buck Clarke and Wilton Felder, in what seem to be made-for-sampling breaks. At the end, Jimmy changes both key and mode into something out of the Arabian Nights as the band finally stops, acknowledging the cheers of the crowd.

Jimmy continued to record into the 1990s, making his last studio album, Dot Com Blues, for Verve just a few years before he passed away in 2005. By the 1970s, he had been around that even his imitators had built up significant traction and recording careers of their own. We’ll hear from a few of these peers next week.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

BONUS: There are a lot of live covers of “Root Down” out there, but this one by Chris Thile’s band is a pretty darned good funkgrass rendition:

BONUS BONUS: Not gonna lie: even as a terribly uninformed hip-hop novice I knew about the Beastie Boys a long time before I heard Jimmy Smith. So in that regard this song was my gateway to this album. It was absolutely mind blowing when Verve released the Jimmy Smith album on CD in (checks notes) 2000 and I could hear what the Beasties were listening to:

Ronnie Foster, Two Headed Freap

The debut recording from Foster puts funk, soul, R&B and jazz into a blender and comes out with a “brew” that’s a genuine classic.

Album of the Week, October 11, 2025

Blue Note Records in 1972 was not the same label that it had been in , or even in 1963. Duke Pearson’s run as head of A&R had shifted the label from the straight-ahead jazz favored by his predecessor Ike Quebec to something a little more au courant. But even Duke was gone, leaving the label in 1971, the same year that label co-founder and famed album cover photographer Francis Wolff died. The label’s corporate parent, Liberty Records, was absorbed by United Artist Records the same year. And A&R executive George Butler took over the label, coming from United Artists, and sponsoring a number of projects aimed at crossing over between the jazz and soul audiences to build more market momentum for the label. Among the artists crossing over in this way were flautist Bobbi Humphrey, guitarist Earl Klugh, trumpeter Donald Byrd, and today’s artist, Ronnie Foster.

Foster grew up in Buffalo, New York and was interested in music from an early age, playing his first show (in a strip club) at age 15. He was not formally educated in jazz, receiving only a month of musical instruction—on the accordion. For this, his first record, he assembled an assortment of musicians that included George Duvivier on bass, Gene Bertoncini on guitar, Gordon Edwards on bass guitar, Jimmy Johnson on drums, Eugene Bianco on harp, George Devens on percussion and vibes, and Arthur Jenkins on congas. Motown producer Wade Marcus, who also had arranged Blue Note sessions for Bobbi Humphrey, Grant Green, Horace Silver, and Marlena Shaw, did the arrangements.

“Chunky” starts out hard with distorted guitar over a four-four beat from Johnson, followed by a syncopated figure from Foster on the Hammond, a long vamp over a four-chord sequence. A sudden shift to a different minor chord provides a quick four-measure bridge and we’re off to the races. Foster’s improvisation is primarily in the right hand, playing runs, venturing out into different tonalities, even quoting the “Love Supreme” progression at one point. His solo goes into runs, chromatic up and down figures that are played so that they smear together, and sustained notes that transition into out-of-tempo arpeggios. The track fades out, leaving us with just a hint of Foster’s rhythmic and improvisational imagination.

“Drowning in the Sea of Love,” a hit written for Joe Simon by Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff, is played as a straight cover of the bluesy soul hit, with lots of color from Bertoncini and George Devens’ vibes. Foster’s playing shows off his harmonic ear, as he harmonizes with the melody and then gives a couple blasts on the organ to introduce the solo proper. He has a pattern here and in “Chunky” of playing with time and meter in a way that seemingly breaks his improvisation free of the groove, right up until the fade-out.

The introduction to “The Two-Headed Freap” could have been titled “Chunky Pt. 2,” with the same pattern of blasting chords almost to the same rhythm. But the chords are a different progression, almost discordant, and things change quickly into a bluesy salsa-inflected solo with a nine-beat turnaround. Foster’s solo gives us a nasty (in a good way) breakdown in the last minute that calls to mind some of Jimmy Smith’s work.

“Summer Song” is an original with melody played by Bertoncini and Devens, over a growling bass line, before Foster’s solo. Here his technique is very different as he works with sustained suspended notes and chords as well as a right hand solo line that stays in the upper octave. The basic materials are fairly static, with vamps over chords that rock back and forth, but George Duvivier’s bass part (not quite a solo) is worth the price of admission.

“Let’s Stay Together” is a cover of Al Green’s hit, which again benefits from Duvivier’s bass as Foster tosses riff after riff off in his solo. The organ seems to have irrepressible energy, riffing at double speed over the groove, right up to the fade-out. “Don’t Knock My Love” is another cover, this one of Wilson Pickett’s last number one hit. Where the original benefited from a measured funky groove, Foster’s cover seems to lack some of the funk of the original even as it speeds up the tempo by a click or two. The fuzz distortion on the guitar doesn’t help matters here as the band threatens to come unglued during the endless wind out.

The fade-out takes us into “Mystic Brew.” Easily the most memorable track on the album, certainly the most sampled, the track opens with a double bass line from both Duvivier and Gordon Edwards, forming a bedrock for the entire song. Bertoncini and Devens’s vibes repeat the tonic together with Eugene Bianco’s harp. Bertoncini doubles Foster as he plays the relaxed main theme, which seems content to hang out on the tonic as Devens and Bertoncini elaborate around the edges. Foster’s solo is more disciplined here, with the first iteration playing with multi-measure suspensions, the second with syncopated eighths, the third evolving into triplets and then rolling sixteenth and even 32nd notes. The performance, in addition to being a complete pleasure, illustrates the ingenuity and athleticism that Foster brings to the table.

“Kentucky Fried Chicken” closes out with a slightly funky riff on a minor third over a funky bass, then shifts gears over a series of odd suspended chords for a moment. Bertoncini gets a brief solo before Foster plays his games with meter and time, at one point chattering like a hen, changing keys, and ripping through a set of arpeggios. So we end as we began, with Foster improvising straight into the fade-out.

Foster cut a series of albums for Blue Note as a leader, including a pretty great Live at Montreux in 1973. He was less successful after leaving the label for Columbia, recording two albums there and one for Pro Jazz between 1978 and 1986. But he produced almost 100 records and had hundreds of sideman credits, including a collaboration with George Benson that began on 1975’s Good King Bad. We’ll hear from him once more, from later in his career. But next week we’ll hear a famous record from an artist who went through a remarkable shift of his own in the early 1970s.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

BONUS: Foster’s live performances of material from this and other albums are spectacular. You can find some on the officially-released Ronnie Foster Live: Cookin’ with Blue Note at Montreux. Here’s “Chunky”:

BONUS BONUS: “Mystic Brew” became an unlikely standard of sorts through sampling and latter-day covers. Notably, A Tribe Called Quest sampled it for “Electric Relaxation” from their 1993 album Midnight Mauraders:

BONUS BONUS BONUS: Maybe the most unlikely cover of all is the way I first heard “Mystic Brew,” in a version by Vijay Iyer’s trio on his 2009 album Historicity:

Seeing the UVA Madrigal Group?

A potential glimpse of a moment in the history of choral music at the University.

University of Virginia Madrigal Group, early 1940s

Some eleven years ago, I wrote that I was “Seeking the UVA Madrigal Group,” looking for more information about a group of women who formed the University of Virginia’s first known vocal performing group. They are first known to exist in 1943, when they joined the Virginia Glee Club in the annual Christmas Concert. We know about the group thanks to concert programs—Christmas in 1943 and 1944, Spring in 1945 and again in 1957—but otherwise have had no information about the group save their existence and their names.

Until last week, when the photo above turned up on eBay. Under the title “University of Virginia Glee Club,” the photo shows what is supposed to be an image of the UVA Madrigal Group, circa 1944. If true, it would be an incredibly valuable piece of history, filling in a blank not only in the history of the UVA choral experience, but also in the historic experience of women at the University.

I say “if true” because I’m still working to trace the provenance of the photo and date it. There are a few challenges that I’m trying to reconcile:

Count of members: There are 16 women in the photo. The 1943 group had 13, and the 1944 group had 30.
Location: Rehearsal and performance spaces with stages were rare at UVa in the 1940s, and would likely either have had a painting (The School of Athens in Old Cabell Hall) or a blackboard (any of the Music Department’s practice rooms or any lecture halls) behind the group. Where was this taken?
Accompanist: The accompanist in 1943-1944 was none other than Randall Thompson. Edwin Guernsey was the assistant accompanist in 1945, but the blurry photo I have of him from Corks and Curls does not exactly resemble the man in the photo above.

Nevertheless, the photo is a tantalizing piece of history, even if it does raise more questions than it answers.

Note: I wrote about the Madrigal Group in Chapter 16 of Ten Thousand Voices, my history of the Virginia Glee Club. You can find it at your bookstore of choice through the link in the right hand side of this page.

Chester Thompson, Powerhouse

An interesting debut from an organist who became better known for his work with Santana, and an album that crosses the organ combo format with James Brown funk.

Album of the Week, October 4, 2025

As jazz organ combos led by Jimmy Smith, Johnny Hammond and others notched record sales and hits, there were more and more young musicians who followed the format. Inevitably some of these played jazz and rock; one of these was Chester D. Thompson, a keyboard player from Oklahoma who started on piano at age 5 and is remembered today for his ten-year association with funk group Tower of Power and his 26-year-long tenure as a member of the Santana band (confusingly enough, sometimes alongside drummer Chester C. Thompson!). But he had plenty of sideman credits to his name in pop and jazz, appearing on tracks with Elton John, Freddie Hubbard, John Lee Hooker, Everlast, Eagle-Eye Cherry and others. And at the very beginning of his career, he cut this album, a straight-ahead jazz record in an unusual organ combo format.

Appearing alongside Thompson on this release are Raymond Pounds, a session drummer who performed with Blue Mitchell, Stevie Wonder (Songs in the Key of Life), Deniece Williams, Quincy Jones, Chaka Khan, Bob Dylan (Knocked Out Loaded) and others; this was his first recording. Tenor sax Rudolph Johnson had played with Jimmy McGriff (about whom more later) and Bill Cosby. And trombonist Al Hall, also making his debut, would have a career playing with Johnny Hammond, Freddie Hubbard, and other jazz-funk acts.

“Mr. T” starts out as a horn driven tune, with both Johnson and Hall blowing strong solos over Thompson’s organ. Thompson’s solo takes the tune into the blues, with increasingly elaborate improvisations over a steady organ bass line. Pounds takes a flourish on the drums at the end but otherwise is here as support.

“Trip One” alternates between two modes through the verse and shifts into a third on the chorus. The band takes a beat between verse and chorus, just enough for Johnson to wind up his sax into orbit. He’s not quite in “sheets of sound” territory here, but it’s a pretty great solo nevertheless, energizing the entire band and taking it through multiple tonalities. Hall’s trombone follows with a slightly more conventional approach, laying back into a more relaxed tone. It’s Johnson’s conception that Thompson follows for his solo, with chromatic runs that shift to different tonalities. The wrap up is slightly spoiled by uneven harmonies in the horns, putting an odd edge on an otherwise cool tune.

Speaking of Bill Cosby, the second side opens with “Weird Harold.” Cosby’s Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids television show was still a year away when this album was recorded, but Cosby had told stories about his childhood friends for years previously in his standup routines, and Old Weird Harold had debuted in “9th Street Bridge” on Cosby’s Revenge album in 1967. This track shares a little of the funky flavor that Herbie Hancock used for his own take on the Cosby kids in Fat Albert Rotunda, but with a considerably higher James Brown quotient. Pounds is the star on this track; listening to the way he used the cymbals on the two as emphasis, you can imagine his future work with Stevie Wonder and Quincy Jones. Johnson’s sax is solidly bluesy and funky throughout, and Thompson’s fiery solo features flourishes and sustained notes that would make Jimmy Smith proud. Hall is confined to the chorus, where he again muffs the harmony parts but plays with great funkiness.

The band as a whole is tighter on “Powerhouse,” triggering off a fiercely funky Pounds drum part and a simmering low organ part. The horns wisely stay in unison and simple harmonies for the head to far greater effect. Johnson’s solo is tight but is only a setup for Thompson, who rips a set of stern modal runs and chords while staying close to the minor third throughout, all while keeping an incredibly tight bass line going in the lower range of the organ.

This was the only recording by the “Powerhouse” band, but Thompson didn’t sit still. By 1973 he had joined Tower of Power during that band’s commercial peak, staying with the band into the early 1980s before joining Carlos Santana’s group in 1983. He kept performing for a long time, turning up at the 2018 40th anniversary celebration of Tower of Power, but primarily stayed outside the organ combo format for rock and roll.

Another young player was about to radically redefine what an “organ combo” could sound like. We’ll hear his debut recording next week.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

BONUS: One of Thompson’s better known Tower of Power songs was “Squib Cakes” from the Back to Oakland album; here he is in a small combo playing the song in 2011.

Brother Jack McDuff, Moon Rappin’

Brother Jack gives us an album that’s alternately spacey and bluesy, and hints at where jazz organ was about to go.

Album of the Week, September 27, 2025

By 1969 a few things had changed in the jazz world. Some of the old formulas for how jazz worked on albums like Brother Jack McDuff’s Hot Barbeque had started to morph, influenced by what was happening in rock and roll (and responding to the shift of youth attention from jazz to rock music). In particular, Miles Davis was listening to Jimi Hendrix, and the music he made in response on records like Filles de Kilimanjaro and Bitches Brew brought a different conception of the role of guitar in improvised music. But other genres were colliding with jazz, particularly funk.

We’ve talked about jazz-funk before in the context of CTI Records and of Herbie Hancock’s glorious Fat Albert Rotunda. By 1969, Blue Note Records had started to embrace this sound in a significant way. Jack McDuff had signed to Blue Note after a brief stint with Atlantic Records, and for this, his second album, he brought together a small army of younger musicians, including Joe Dukes on drums (and a guest appearance from Richard Davis on bass for two tracks) and dove into some truly strange, but truly glorious, jazz-funk explorations.

“Flat Backin’” starts us off in fine form, with the melody stated by Richard Davis’ funky, funky bass and a flourish on the drums from Spider Bryce, and a spiraling guitar line from Melvin Sparks that pans right to left. When McDuff enters on the Hammond, he’s right in the middle of everything, including a horn section that appear for a moment and then back away as the cymbal and bass restate the groove. And then—zowie!—it’s as though the track travels back in time at least ten years as the bass groove falls back into a swinging fast four and the band gives us a scampering improvisation, only to fall back to that groovy bass and an echo-laden guitar freak out, followed by a Hammond solo. Structurally the track keeps returning to that bass groove. It’s undeniably cool—not as out there as Bitches Brew but still fun to listen to.

“Oblighetto” is a more straightforward blues, given juice by Sparks’ guitar, right up until we get four measures of unexpected chords from McDuff and a spacey vocal in a minor mode, à la Star Trek. And then we shift gears again into a fast four as McDuff and drummer Vince DiLeonardi give us a little boogaloo, only to return to the minor mode and vocals once more. The band finishes with a return to the boogaloo, and one more minor chord.

“Moon Rappin’” is another jazz-funk workout, with a Richard Davis bass line and a winding chord progression that exercises both McDuff and the horns. After the lead, the band settles into a groove around a fifth, on which the horns unfortunately blow a little out of tune. But the reverby McDuff piano solo makes it all worthwhile. We then get a tasty minor blues that adjusts the bass line melody from “Flat Backin’” into something anticipatory and deeply funky, especially as Melvin Sparks’ guitar seems to reverb into outer space.

“Made in Sweden” threatens to invade “Take Five” territory, but it’s in six rather than five, and the melody goes in a slightly different direction, staying more closely wedded to the groove. Ron Park’s flute is a great addition to the theme, but the real star is McDuff’s Hammond, which threatens to levitate into outer space throughout his solo. A drum break separates the second half of the tune, in which a two-note riff moves from the organ to the horns and back “Loose Foot” picks up where “Made in Sweden” left off, but it’s a more straightahead tune and a showcase for Ron Park’s tenor sax. McDuff gives us a blues-forward solo in which he displays his virtuosic touch on the organ. The band closes out the outer-space album in a most grounded way, with the blues.

McDuff was a survivor; he kept on recording through the ’70s, even as commercial interest in jazz collapsed, and enjoyed a career renaissance in the late 1980s and 1990s, recording albums for Muse and Concord Jazz. He died in January 2001, less than a year after touring Japan at age 73. While he certainly picked up influences from the jazz-funk movement, he never tipped over into the sound wholesale. But other jazz organists did, and in a few weeks we’ll hear one of the most famous examples of the genre. Before we get there, though, there are a few other interesting corners of the jazz organ world to explore; we’ll hear one next week.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

BONUS: I included “Flat Backin’” in my “Cooking with Fat” episode of Exfiltration Radio, an hour-long exploration of jazz-funk. You can listen to that radio show below:

Johnny “Hammond” Smith, Nasty!

Another master of the jazz organ gives us a coolly simmering combo record, featuring John Abercrombie’s record debut.

Album of the Week, September 20, 2025

If you are a jazz performer, but there’s already another jazz performer with your name, giving yourself a stage name is a common practice. In the case of Johnny Smith from Louisville, Kentucky, he adopted his instrument of choice as part of his nickname, to avoid being confused with guitarist Johnny Smith from Alabama. His first album appeared in 1958 on small label Arrow Records, followed by two albums on the slightly less small New Jazz label in 1959. On the second New Jazz label, he was Johnny “Hammond” Smith. He moved to Prestige in 1961 and recorded a series of organ combo albums, leading up to today’s album.

For this 1968 session Smith was joined by an interesting group of musicians. We’re very familiar with Grady Tate from his work with Jimmy Smith; he had parted ways with Smith’s group following 1967’s Respect. Saxophonist Houston Person came from Florence, South Carolina, and had been recording as a leader for Prestige for much of the 1960s. And John Abercrombie was an American jazz guitarist who had just graduated from the Berklee School of Music in Boston, where he had played shows at Paul’s Mall, leading to his meeting Smith; this was his first non-student recording. Abercrombie would go on to have a long career as both sideman and leader, recording for ECM among other labels; we will get to one of those other recordings one of these days.

The opening track, Frank Loesser’s “If I Were a Bell,” is given a very different treatment from Miles Davis’ version on Relaxin’. Here Grady Tate’s syncopated drumming gives the tune a heavy swing feel as Smith outlines the opening “bells” and the melody on the Hammond, with a good amount of ornamentation around the edges. Smith’s opening statement is pretty “cool” and stays in the baritone range. Abercrombie takes the first solo and gives it a cool fire, with a swinging arpeggiated run at the tune. Smith keeps things relaxed and cool at first, but starts to lean into the blue notes at the end of his solo, which Person picks up with a straight-ahead blues. Smith brings things back to a simmer at the end; the listener is surprised to realize that in the relaxed session, a full eight and a half minutes go by.

Horace Silver’s “Song for My Father,” which we’ll hear again one of these days, is a classic of the post-bop jazz repertoire, with Brazilian rhythms and Cape Verdean Portuguese folk roots. Here Smith gives it a slower, deeper reading, with the melody down in the lower octave and leaning into the grace notes and turns of the descending tune. Tate’s drums and Abercrombie’s guitar provide a solid bed for Silver’s exploration. When Abercrombie’s solo enters, we get a bluesy hybrid between samba and boogie. Person’s solo is R&B flavored but played with great restraint throughout; overall the band keeps the lid on even as the pot nears the boil.

“Speak Low,” Kurt Weill’s ballad to lyrics by Ogden Nash from the musical One Touch of Venus¹, is here turbocharged with crashing drums from Tate and a ripping solo from Abercrombie, whose virtuosity is on full display. Smith takes the lid off here and gives us a rollicking turn through the tune. “Unchained Melody,” by contrast, is bright and laid-back, almost conversational, with none of the drama of the 1965 Righteous Brothers version. Weighing in at less than four minutes, the take still has a little room for Smith to be playful as he slips in a quote from Simon and Garfunkel’s “We’ve Got a Groovy Thing Goin’” (!).

“Nasty,” one of two Smith originals on the album, is the standout tune, a forty bar blues (which relaxes into a more conventional twelve bar blues in the solos) featuring a rippling trill in the melody line. Each of the players in turn lean into the blues note hard, earning the name of the tune. Tate’s drums here are a thing to behold, a seamless combination of march rhythm and swing that shuffles along under the solos.

“Four Bowls of Soul” is a more straightforward blues from Smith to close us out. Abercrombie’s solo has a few non-blue notes around the edges but otherwise delivers the promised soul. So does Smith, who sets aside reserve and gives us a solo that, if lacking some of the mojo of Jimmy Smith, still has plenty up its sleeve, including an eyebrow raising detour into waltz time. Person plays the blues, bringing his solo up into the high end of the tenor sax’s range with a satisfying wail. The tune fades out on Smith’s recapitulation, sounding as if he could play these coolly soulful blues forever.

Smith had a long recording career, with over forty albums to his credit as leader, most for Prestige. Later in his career, changing his stage name to Johnny Hammond, he recorded for Creed Taylor’s Kudu label (his album Breakout was the first release on the soul jazz label) and for Milestone, where he made a series of jazz-funk albums including the great Gears. At the core of all his recordings were an impeccable sense of harmony and rhythm. There haven’t been a lot of reissues of his work, so grab it if you find it—I feel lucky I was able to score a copy of Nasty from a used record store in Asheville.

The Hammond players we’ve heard so far have stuck pretty close to the organ combo formula as introduced and perfected by Jimmy Smith. One of the folks we’ve heard before is about to change that in a pretty big way. We’ll listen to that album next week.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

BONUS: I would bet money that Sly Stone was listening to this album when he was working on Stand!; just listen to the instrumental break following the opening chorus at about 0:56. (This part of the song shows up in a lot of hip-hop, including “Because I Got It Like That” by the Jungle Brothers.)

It’s sentences like that one that make the history of popular music in the 20th century so great. ↩︎

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:

Jimmy Smith, Swings Along with Stranger in Paradise

Recorded in 1955 during Jimmy Smith’s earliest days, this 1966 release shows where he came from and gives tantalizing hints of where he was headed.

Album of the Week, August 30, 2025

We’ve listened to a pretty fair amount of Jimmy Smith performing at peak levels, after he turned the organ trio into a vital form of jazz—as well as how his artistry translated into other settings with the help of Oliver Nelson, Claus Ogerman and Lalo Schifrin. But where did it all come from? What did Smith sound like at the beginning of his career when he was just getting started? Fortunately, thanks to a budget label’s 1966 reissue, we have a pretty good document of his earliest sound.

Pickwick Records is today probably best known as the home of Lou Reed in the earliest days of his career, where he wrote and performed songs like “Cycle Annie” and “You’re Driving Me Insane” as the fictional bands the Beachnuts and the Roughnecks. But they also reissued albums from other labels in their Pickwick/33 line (we listened to a Robert Shaw Christmas album they reissued a few years ago). Swings Along with Stranger in Paradise is one of those releases, combining tracks from his early recording with the Don Gardner Trio with other early Jimmy Smith recordings. I’d love to be more definitive about the years and personnel on these sessions, but as I said: budget label. All we really have is the music, and fortunately, it’s pretty good, even if it’s recognizably early in Smith’s development.

Note: Not all the tracks on this budget compilation are available on YouTube. I’ve done the best I can to link them but they come from different editions of the compilation, which was also issued under the titles The Fantastic Jimmy Smith, Fantastic, and Jeepers Creepers.

“Stranger in Paradise” is one of the numbers from the Don Gardner recording, featuring Gardner on drums and Al Cass on tenor saxophone, along with an unnamed guitarist and other musicians. Gardner was a jazz and R&B performer who spent some years on the chitlin circuit before he had a hit song in 1962 with Dee Dee Ford, “I Need Your Lovin’.” (Following Smith’s departure, his seat at the organ was taken by Richard “Groove” Holmes, about which more later.) This session dates to 1955, when Gardner was still working the R&B circuit, and this performance sounds like it: Cass’s saxophone is swoopy and dramatic, and Smith obliges with his best high-vibrato organ sound. There’s none of the rhythmic stabs or high-octave work that characterized Smith’s later work, and almost no Gardner, whose contributions are lost in the background of the poor-quality recording, but you can hear Smith pulling at the bit, providing tension through glissandi and tremolo effects throughout.

“Jimmy’s Jam” is with the same group, but does not appear to have been issued on other sessions. It’s a fast number with Al Cass improvising as quickly as he can over rapid chord changes from Smith. When Smith takes over, he blazes through the improvisations, and it’s now that we hear some of the later hallmarks of his technique, with high octave work and sustained chords to build tension. Cass attempts to end it on a “shave and a haircut” rhythm, but Smith lands it himself with a sustained diminished chord followed by a triumphant resolution. “It’s a Sin to Tell a Lie” is cast from the same mold, with Cass, Smith and the guitarist all stating the melody in unison in the first verse, Cass taking a straight ahead solo with increasingly animated support from Smith in the second, and Smith displaying keen rhythmic imagination in the third and fourth verses.

“I Can’t Give You Anything But Love” gives us a straight ahead organ trio, with Smith mostly running through the melody at something like breakneck speed, adorned by small flourishes here and there as well as small amounts of support from the guitarist. (The engineer for this session appears to have given up trying to balance between the Leslie speakers in the organ and the other instruments; even the drums are barely audible most of the time.)

“I Had the Craziest Dream” brings us back Al Cass on saxophone and returns us to the lugubrious world of “Stranger in Paradise.” Smith is here strictly in a supporting role, and there’s not that much of interest going on. “Tell Me (Vocal)” is another thing again; though it’s hard to tell, I think that’s Don Gardner himself singing the lead alongside the anonymous bass back-up singer, although in a much more conventional tone than the R&B shout he used for “I Need Your Lovin.’” Again Smith is relegated to the background, but the penetrating sound of the Hammond ensures that he at least remains audible, and he gets a triumphant major chord to close things out.

“I Hear a Rhapsody (Vocal)” follows the same formula as “Tell Me,” with two-part barbershop vocals placed way up high in the mix with Smith relegated to the background. Harder to imagine a squarer version of this song, right up until Smith’s final chord where there’s a little redemption from Smith’s undeniable energy. “Jeepers Creepers,” thankfully, gives us a full-steam-ahead Smith attack as he and Cohn team up to take the old Harry Warren/Johnny Mercer chestnut at something approaching a fast clip, and Smith’s solo opens a technicolor window of chromatic energy across the listener’s mind.

“Jimmy’s Swing” is another quartet number in “foot stomper” mode (as Variety editor Herman Schoenfeld puts it in the liner notes). Smith builds suspension by repeating the same vamp figure beneath Cass for a full verse, before taking a solo in the high register that sounds like it’s preparing for liftoff. Ultimately instead of liftoff we get a restrained restatement of the theme swung in the saxophone and guitar.

“Misery (Vocal)” gives us a shouting blues with Gardner singing, with both guitar and sax providing support. The guitarist steps out of the shadows for a well-executed solo, and Cass provides some fine shouts around the edges. Jimmy is left in the background; this is an R&B number with the organ strictly in a supplemental role.

A lot of Swings Along With Stranger in Paradise betrays its origins: an R&B leaning session mostly led by Don Gardner. But there are enough flashes of brilliance, particularly on “I Can’t Give You Anything but Love,” “Jimmy’s Jam” and the other fast numbers, to hear where Jimmy Smith was going to go—and how his imagination was already breaking the jazz organ out from its supporting role into a lead instrument. We’ll hear more from Jimmy’s later career as he continued to evolve his sound, but beginning next week, we’ll mix in other organists that followed in his footsteps—albeit taking the music to some very different places.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

BONUS: Jimmy Smith didn’t revisit much of the music from this session in his later recordings, but “I Can’t Give You Anything But Love” was an exception. Here’s the version from his third recording for Blue Note from 1956:

Jimmy Smith, Organ Grinder Swing

Taking the jazz organ combo back to its simplest, and most powerful, configuration, this trio album with Kenny Burrell and Grady Tate is a relaxed classic.

Album of the Week, August 23, 2025

After his first set of albums for Verve, including massive orchestral arrangements courtesy of Oliver Nelson and Claus Ogerman, as well as ’60s pop freakouts courtesy of the amazing Lalo Schifrin, it must have seemed like Jimmy Smith could do anything. What he did, in fact, was quietly subversive: he went back to basics.

Recorded in June 1965, Organ Grinder Swing marked a return to the organ trio format, allowing us to hear Smith’s craft in a more intimate setting. Both Kenny Burrell and Grady Tate return from the 1964 recordings, so there’s a feeling of simpatico among the three players. They produced a set that was both more relaxed and more ambitious than the 1964 recordings, one that made a big impact on the jazz organ repertoire.

“Organ Grinder’s Swing” seems to start mid-thought, with a snare hit and a bluesy organ riff that is already going full tilt over choogling guitar chords. Then: an organ hit, and what can only be described as a mumble. I’m pretty good at deciphering studio chatter, and I’ve replayed that mumble so many times that my 15 year old has started to give me side eye, and I still can’t figure out what Jimmy says. Someone online claims he was speaking the lyrics to the Organ Grinder’s song. Sure. We’ll go with that. What the mumble signifies is that we’re playing loose and relaxed, and that’s a good thing. Jimmy then plays the main melody, which bears a striking resemblance to “I Love Coffee, I Love Tea.” (Looking at you, songwriter Will Hudson.) Kenny Burrell rips a swinging solo and passes it over to Smith, who makes with some serious boogying. Then: more mumbling, one more run through the blues, a hit, and it’s over. The tune, released as a single, broke the Hot 100, topping out at 92; in a just world, it would have gotten higher.

More studio chatter starts off “Oh No, Babe,” as Jimmy calls out the take number, someone in the background yelps, and he hits a bluesy chord, then sings “Oh no, babe” before hitting a series of dark chords. He hollers a little, grunts a little, and eventually finds his way into a blues, with Kenny Burrell limning out the chords as Smith finds them. We get a melodic solo from Kenny that takes us deeper into the deeply funky waters, with Smith approvingly moaning “Oh yeah” behind him. There’s a simmering tremolo from Smith that stretches over eight long bars before erupting into a boil. He continues to build tension this way for three more verses before taking a step back and trading licks with Burrell, up to a triumphant final fanfare. For a studio jam, it’s also a masterclass in Smith’s improvisational style.

“Blues for J” is another Jimmy Smith blues, but this one is more tightly composed, with some offbeat chords setting up a merry romp down the keys. Here Smith does a little grunting but a lot more dazzling keyboard work, taking it romping down the street with a happy little blues dance. It says something about this record that even a tossed off composition like this one feels tightly composed and arranged; Smith was having fun but he was also on fire.

That brings us to “Greensleeves,” and you’re well warned to buckle your seatbelt for this one. There had been other jazz arrangements of “Greensleeves” before, but Smith’s clear point of departure is John Coltrane’s 1961 adaptation from his great Africa/Brass, complete with the alternating suspended chords, here played by Smith himself as the introduction to the tune. Again we jump right into the swing of things, with Burrell sketching out the chords while Tate propels things from beneath. Jimmy plays the chorus a beat behind throughout, leading to some happily disorienting rhythmic fakeouts when the alternating chords return. Burrell sounds as though he had been waiting all week for someone to ask him to solo over modal chords, and he takes two runs before Jimmy steps in. Jimmy’s energy is infectious—no noodling around the blues here, he’s cranked up to 11 from the very beginning. At the same time, some of the improvisational gestures are familiar; he still leans on the chords across multiple bars to build tension, and from his work with the orchestras he’s learned the art of leaning into the higher octave to signal the climax. At the five-and-a-half minute mark, he reprises the theme, making us think we might be drawing to a close, but he explodes out of the recap with another swirling soul arpeggio, a tossed-off chromatic descending scale, and more. Ultimately Creed Taylor and Rudy Van Gelder have to fade out the jam; it shows every sign of continuing indefinitely into the present.

The Billy Reid/Buddy Kaye classic “I’ll Close My Eyes” here begins as a muted ballad, with Kenny Burrell taking the lead over Smith’s gentle chordal accompaniment and Grady Tate’s brushes. Smith’s solo continues in the same contemplative vein, though the organ’s timbre ensures a less wistful mood. Then it’s straight into Duke Ellington’s “Satin Doll,” which at first sounds like a straight read, until you hear the chord progression out of the A part of the chorus into Kenny Burrell’s B part. There’s a lot more going on in this arrangement, from Burrell’s slightly off-kilter, always virtuosic reading of the melody through his solo, through Smith’s increasingly crunchy chords and doggedly bluesy take on the melody. When he rolls his way through a verse, and takes another in a high tone that sounds like nothing so much like a skating rink solo, you just have to sit back, nod your head, and listen. To paraphrase another great artist, the funk is so fat you might gain weight … but that’s a different record for another time.

Though the standout here is clearly “Greensleeves”—other organists have taken his arrangement and made it a standard part of the Hammond repertoire—this whole album stands as a landmark of the jazz organ canon. At once relaxed and ambitious, and always deeply soulful, it’ll make a believer out of even the most skeptical listener.

Smith continued to record at a high rate for Verve through the end of the 1960s and into the early 1970s. There were a few other sessions released on other labels as well; next week’s represented an archival find when it was originally released in 1966.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

BONUS: Here’s Jimmy and the band playing the title cut live in 1965 from the Hollywood Palace:

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:

Thelonious Monk, Mønk

A recently discovered live recording of Monk’s greatest quartet in their prime.

Album of the Week, July 26, 2025

Thelonious Monk recorded his final record for Columbia, Underground, in 1968, following several live albums and Solo Monk. While the record featured a number of new compositions, it marked an end rather than a revitalization. By the early 1970s, Monk was done, having made a handful of recordings on smaller labels. He retired for health reasons, having been diagnosed with psychiatric disorders and prescribed medications that made him uncommunicative.¹ He spent the last six years of his life as a guest of the Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter, dying of a stroke in 1982. So his would seem an unlikely wellspring in which to find a source of new recordings.

But, just as new Coltrane tapes have been turning up in odd places, so a few significant Monk recordings have surfaced in the last few years. An improbable session booked by a 16-year-old high school student and taped by the high school’s janitor, Palo Alto captured the final known performance of Monk’s last quartet with Charlie Rouse, Larry Gales and Ben Riley. And a 1963 live recording from the Odd Fellows Palaeet in Copenhagen surfaced on tapes rescued from a dumpster yields today’s album, a rare live document of his greatest quartet with Rouse, bassist John Ore, and drummer Frankie Dunlop. Together they had recorded two great sessions for Columbia; they were in the middle of sessions for Criss-Cross at the time of this concert, but Monk’s Dream had just been released, so three of the tracks come from those sessions.

“Bye-Ya,” one of the Monk’s Dream tracks, had a long simmer in Monk’s book of compositions, having been recorded for Prestige on Thelonious Monk Trio in 1952. The tune is a 32-bar Latin tune, originally titled “Go”; when producer Bob Weinstock wanted a name with more of a Latin feel, Monk literally translated it, called it “Vaya,” which became “Bye-Ya” in his inimitable dialect. The performance here starts out with a syncopated explosion from Dunlop, who had previously recorded with Sonny Stitt, Sonny Rollins, and Duke Ellington, among others. Monk enters on a two note pattern while Rouse states the melody, and then we’re off to the races with a brilliant contrafact from the saxophonist over two verses. Despite his reputation for eccentricity, Monk is tight here with the rhythm section, the whole unit performing with a snap and flair. There’s no sense of the mountain-climbing hard labor that characterized Brilliant Corners; Rouse, Dunlop and Ore knew this material like the backs of their hands, so they provide a sense of ease and delight as they stretch out through the material. Monk’s own soloing is similarly relaxed and joyous, at one point embracing an off-the-beat series of staccato exclamations that fit naturally with the rest of the tune.

“Nutty” also originated on Thelonious Monk Trio and had last been recorded on Thelonious Monk with John Coltrane in 1957, but was a staple of Monk’s live sets. Monk opens with a jaunty statement of the melody, and then Rouse is off to the races, playing brisk double-time runs over bursts of chords from Monk and a constant support from Ore and Dunlop. The bassist, who would go on to play with Sun Ra, gives a dry walking bass that touches the corners of Monk’s unusual chords and then walks off into other neighboring dimensions, all while keeping things tightly anchored. Monk’s solo breaks apart the bits of the tune; he finds a five-note pattern and holds onto it, repeating it four times against the changing chords. The last of his solo is sketched in bare chords that leave most of each measure open, allowing Ore’s bass and the pops and booms of Dunlop’s drums to show through.

While his own tunes show little of the stride piano that tinges his playing of Ellington and his later performance on Solo Monk, it raises its head on “I’m Getting Sentimental Over You”; presumably he reserved the technique for the compositions of others, like this 1932 tune written for Tommy Dorsey by George Bassman and Ned Washington. There’s very little sentimentality in Rouse’s solo, which takes off at high speed and gives us a briskly virtuosic tour through the corners of the tune. Monk’s solo eases off on the Fats Waller influence, giving a more modern be-bop take on the tune, complete with a descending line that sounds rather like someone coming down the stairs sideways.

The great classic “Body and Soul,” also appearing on Monk’s Dream, here gets a rubato solo take by Monk that plays some chordal adjacencies and re-voicings, as well as some of the chromatic vamps that make for some of the most distinctive Monk sounds in his own compositions. The subsequent verses are done in strict time, though some of Monk’s improvisations play against the beat in a way that threaten to unravel the momentum. Just as one begins to fear that we’re stuck in the offbeat eternally, Monk clicks the melody back into time, rewarding the listener with a breathtaking glissando. It’s a fine performance that would have shone on Solo Monk.

“Monk’s Dream” headlines the album of the same name, but its origins also go back to Thelonious Monk Trio. The chord progression threatens to make the listener’s ears cross-eyed, as it were, but the quartet makes it sound easy, with brisk rolls from Dunlop punctuating each phrase of the song. Monk plays a series of leading tones under Rouse, leading to a feeling of instability in the tune and a feeling that Rouse is about to come unmoored and play away into some other song. But as they continue to play the connection reiterates itself and the wooziness is revealed to be deliberate. Rouse plays the last verse of his solo without Monk; without the chords it’s easier to hear Rouse’s conception of the melody. When Monk returns, he brings back the leading tone patterns and then slowly builds a solo around them, exploring outward chromatically, anchoring one entire verse of the solo a defiant tone away from the tonic. Indeed, the performance might serve as a sort of Rosetta Stone to his overall conception of melody, as he digs into everything but the tonic, finding joy in the adjacencies of tone.

Mønk is part of a wave of newly discovered jazz tapes that threaten to swamp the listener in an embarrassment of riches—and might seem to threaten the efforts of newer players. After all, why seek out the recordings of a Tyshawn Sorey or Linda May Han Oh when another lost recording from Coltrane, Monk or Bill Evans beckons? The answer, of course, is “¿Porque no los dos?” And there’s some truly fantastic material being recorded today (though not often being released on vinyl, which limits how much of it I’ll write about in this series). Next week we’ll start listening to different performers on the same (groovy) instrument in recordings that stretch from

You can listen to this week’s album here:

BONUS: 1963 was busy for Monk and his quartet. A less pristine tape capturing a performance in Stockholm by the group was released as the bootleg Live in Stockholm 1963, and it’s worth a listen as well.

This may have contributed to some of Monk’s reputation for eccentricity. Or it could just have been his style. The saxophonist Charles Lloyd, who was up and coming in the late 1960s, tells a story about being on tour with Monk in which the great man danced around Lloyd’s dressing room between sets and, despite a plea from Pannonica, drank an entire pitcher of orange juice because Lloyd told him it was “tainted.” ↩︎

Thelonious Monk, Solo Monk

Monk alone is Monk distilled to a deceptively simple sounding essence.

Album of the Week, July 19, 2025

The mid- to late-1950s were a good time, compositionally, for Thelonious Monk. Following the critical success of Brilliant Corners, he released a series of additional albums, including the 1957 Monk’s Music with John Coltrane and Coleman Hawkins, that documented his growing list of original compositions. At the same time, his works were being covered, and celebrated, by a growing list of jazz luminaries, including Miles Davis on his ‘Round About Midnight, the first Columbia recording of his first great quintet and made at the same time as Workin’, Cookin’, Steamin’, and Relaxin’.

But not everything was idyllic. In 1958, Monk and the Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter were detained by police in Delaware en route to a gig, who beat him with a blackjack when he refused to answer questions. And in 1960, his relationship with Riverside Records soured over royalties, which would ultimately declare bankruptcy in 1963 following cofounder Bill Grauer Jr’s sudden death. Monk ended up signing to Columbia Records in 1962. It was a great move commercially for Monk, as the larger label could devote more resources to promoting the genius. (He was to have appeared on the cover of Time Magazine in November 1963, but the story was delayed due to the assassination of John F. Kennedy; it ultimately ran in February 1964, at which point he became one of the only modern jazz musicians to ever be featured on the cover.) But his well of new compositions dried up, and many of the records featured re-recordings of earlier compositions with his new band, featuring Charlie Rouse on tenor, John Ore on bass, and Frankie Dunlop on drums.

So we come to Solo Monk, recorded in 1964 and 1965, in the middle of his eight-album run for Columbia, and featuring Monk on solo piano on a program of his own compositions and a set of unusual standards. The program kicks off with “Dinah,” a popular song from 1925 by Harry Akst with lyrics by Sam M. Lewis and Joe Young, and which was more associated with Louis Armstrong and Cab Calloway than with the bebop intelligentsia. The anonymous liner notes for Solo Monk sound a note of surprise at the stride flavor of Monk’s interpretation, which should be no surprise to us after our the last few weeks. The piece as a whole is a light-hearted romp that does prove that Monk has a sense of humor, but it’s more than just a joke. Though the first part of the work has the propulsive drive and left-hand block chords of the old stride piano style, giving the feel of a 1930s show tune, the end suddenly shifts to a freer style and we see through Monk’s eyes the title character, no longer a caricature but someone fully modern and distinctive—complete with a closing trill on the highest notes of the piano. As the liner notes say, Monk had a sense of humor, but that’s not all that’s shown here.

“I Surrender, Dear” is familiar to us, having appeared on Brilliant Corners. This version has fewer of the outer eccentricities that appeared on that album. We don’t get anything like stride until Monk gets to the B section, and it isn’t until the second repetition that he starts to elaborate the melody, complete with some of the flat-finger seconds and clusters—and some brilliant tossed-off runs. He takes the last chorus with a good deal of rubato and an octave-long run down the keyboard.

“Sweet and Lovely” (by Gus Arnheim, Charles N. Daniels and Harry Tobias) is one of those tunes that seems to lurk in the collective memory; I couldn’t have told you the tune from the name, but it’s instantly recognizable (probably from old “Tom and Jerry” cartoons). Monk’s rendition follows the same pattern as “I Surrender, Dear,” with the first verse played straight (albeit with stride left hand, a tremolo in the right hand, and the melody in octaves). The improvisation on the third chorus, however, turns the song into a new composition, with a single phrase repeated in rhythm across the whole verse. For the final run through, Monk returns to the tremolo effect, but again brings us into a deeper emotional moment in the final rubato section.

“North of the Sunset,” only recorded on this album, is a Monk blues with a syncopated opening theme, full of pauses. The B section takes the melody and elaborates it into a fuller sound. Monk only gives us two repetitions of the whole thing; the track ends at 1:50 with the sound of the pedal dropping back into place. He saves his energy for a solo version of “Ruby, My Dear,” which immediately follows. Written in 1945, it’s one of his oldest compositions and one that he returned to often; we previously heard it on Monk’s Music. Here the improvisation is limited: some alternate rhythms in the B section, a few accelerated and double time sections in the final repetition, and a dip into a new key at the very end. Otherwise we are left to soak in the ballad.

“I’m Confessin’ (That I Love You),” a jazz standard with origins in a tune recorded by Fats Waller, gets a similar treatment. Here Monk’s exuberance peeks through a bit more in the hard-swinging syncopation, the spontaneous arpeggios in the B section as it turns into the chord change, and the extended bridge linking the first and second repetitions. Monk’s improvisation on the second repetition seems to take flight with two voices, while still anchored by the steady chords of the left hand. Again, a brief pause and a rubato run down to a final chord, followed by a high, far-off twinkle.

Ray Noble’s “I Hadn’t Anyone Till You” takes a freer initial approach to the late 1930s popular song, at least until the B section when the steady stride chords make their return. The end, with a pause for effect before a final declaration that swoops up the entire keyboard, lands in a key of joyous wonder.

We’ve heard “Everything Happens to Me” before, on Wynton Marsalis’s Standard Time Vol. 3. This version is briskly unsentimental by comparison, but still retains the loveliness of Tom Adair and Matt Dennis’s melody, even as it swings into something a little more dancelike, if one can imagine Monk’s eccentric shuffle as a dance. And as he steps away from the strict rhythm into a free moment for a while, suddenly it is a dance that ends with that same high note of wonder.

“Monk’s Point” is another Monk blues, this one featuring a repeated “bent note” (as bent as notes played on a keyboard can get). It’s a spirited tune that seamlessly flows from the theme into a sort of hybrid ragtime reel; as with “North of the Sunset,” it’s in and out in less than two minutes, but sees far more development in those two minutes.

“I Should Care,” the standard from Axel Stordahl and Paul Weston with Sammy Cahn, has been covered by everyone from Bill Evans to Johnny Hartman to Frank Sinatra, and the interpretations usually skew to the sentimental or the jaunty. Monk steers away from both interpretations. His approach is less jaunty, more defiant; you can hear the determination to give the impression that the narrator is just sleeping fine, that he doesn’t go around weeping. But that twist ending—“And I do”—is present from the beginning of Monk’s interpretation, especially in the end as the moving parts fall away and we’re left with an aching suspended chord before the final resolution. All in two minutes.

“Ask Me Now” is the last Monk composition on the album, and the only one to get more than two minutes’ running time. It keeps good company with “I Should Care,” sounding like a more conventional ballad than “Ruby, My Dear,” but the constantly shifting tonality reminds us that Monk’s simplicity is usually complex even as his complexity often is in the service of something very simple. In this case, the melody is eminently singable, even as the tonality seems to shift like the facets of a crystal in sunlight. Monk takes some rubato into the final verse, and a splash of a high cluster chord together with a Woody Woodpeckeresque final run let us know the narrator’s demands ultimately grow increasingly insistent.

We last heard “These Foolish Things (Remind Me of You)” performed by Johnny Hartman, but again Monk takes a different interpretive path, shedding Hartman’s overt emotion for a more abstract interpretation. You can hear his tonal imagination at work in the chord sequence that ends the first chorus, the run that takes us into the bridge, the progression that seems to take us off a chromatic cliff into the final verse. The final bridge is taken freely in not-quite-double time for a moment, until it settles down for the final chorus, and one last surprise: a lingering chromatic chord that never resolves, fading into silence and the runout groove.

Monk would record three more studio albums for Columbia, but only the last one, Underground, would feature a significant amount of new works. Arguably, the most rewarding recordings from this period are the live recordings that document the band with Rouse, of which one (Misterioso Live on Tour ) was released while Monk was signed to the label. But he toured extensively during this time, and there have been other live recordings from this period, surfacing as recently as the last few years, that have been exceptional. We’ll close this series with one of those next week.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

BONUS: “Monk’s Point” received new life on the 1968 album Monk’s Blues in a big band arrangement by the inimitable Oliver Nelson. Here’s that arrangement:

Thelonious Monk, Brilliant Corners

The genius of Monk is in full flower here in his third recording for Riverside Records in 1956.

Album of the Week, July 12, 2025

Thelonious Monk followed up the 1955 pair of standards albums (recorded as his first for Riverside Records) with a bang. Brilliant Corners consists of five Monk originals, of which only “Bemsha Swing” was previously recorded, and with a title track so complicated that producer and Riverside founder Orrin Keepnews had to assemble it from multiple takes. But unlike previous Monk outings that were doomed to obscurity, Corners was a critical smash hit, with Nat Hentoff calling it “Riverside’s most important modern jazz LP to date.”

The album was recorded in a trio of late 1956 sessions, with slightly different personnel. The October 9 and 15 sessions featured a quintet with Sonny Rollins and Ernie Henry on saxophone, Oscar Pettiford on bass, and mighty bebop drummer Max Roach. A follow-up session on December 7 saw trumpeter Clark Terry replacing Henry and bass giant Paul Chambers replacing Pettiford.

“Brilliant Corners” begins slowly, as if the band is learning the melody by rote, following Monk’s initial solo statement, and then taking it through a series of key changes until it gets back to the beginning. But once that initial statement is underway, they restate the theme in double-time, demonstrating the band’s virtuosity as well as the difficulty of the composition. Rollins takes the first solo, playing ahead of and behind the beat in the single time section and unleashing a series of blisteringly fast improvisations in the double-time. Monk’s solo plays through the melody and demonstrates an unconventional solo technique on the fast passage: he plays a few bars, drops out, then reenters a few bars later with a blistering attack. Ernie Henry’s solo is fat, soulful, and not nearly as facile with the material as Rollins; the story goes that Monk dropped out under his solo to keep from distracting the alto player. He was not the only one to explore silence in the complex tune; the story goes that Orrin Keepnews had to check the microphones on Pettiford’s bass after one take, only to find that the otherwise highly skilled bassist was actually miming. The magnificent Max Roach seems fully at ease here, unleashing a blistering, melodically rich solo before the last chorus. Notoriously, the group never finished a complete take of the number; Keepnews assembled the version on the record from several fragmentary takes of the number. That may be so, but it’s a brilliant (no pun intended) assemblage.

“Ba-Lu Bolivar Ba-Lues-Are” (Monk’s phonetic rendering of the “Blue Bolivar Blues”) is named after the Bolivar Hotel, the Manhattan home ground of his patroness, the Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter. The tune starts as a simple enough blues, but Ernie Henry’s smeary bebop improvisation over Roach’s precise stumble of a drum accompaniment quickly shifts it into something more. Monk’s imaginative and complex solo illustrates both his genius and his flat-fingered playing style, which often resulted in his hitting seconds and famously led to his assertion that “there are no wrong notes on the piano.” As if to underscore the genius of his approach, there are also virtuosic passages that introduce completely new melodies, one of which Sonny Rollins takes as a point of departure for his own solo. As before, Roach unleashes fusillades of snare sound under Rollins’ flights of improvisational fancy. Pettiford demonstrates his usual aplomb in an extended solo that leans into the blue notes of the tune.

“Pannonica” is an example of that most underappreciated of compositional categories: the Monk ballad. Played on the celeste rather than the piano by the composer, Monk introduces the melody dedicated to his patroness before the full ensemble joins and states the theme. Monk plays it more or less straight, with a few flourishes around the edges and the sliding chromaticism of the tune the only clues that we are in his genius realm. Sonny Rollins takes the first solo, seemingly at double tempo, though in reality the chords of the tune move at the same tempo as of the introduction; it’s just that he switches from quarter to eighth notes, as it were. Underneath him, Monk switches to the piano more or less undetected; one wonders whether this magic was accomplished with a swiveling chair or by the keen editorial hand of Keepnews. That it’s all live is eventually given away (and described in the liner notes) as Monk plays the second 16 bars of his solo with left hand on the piano keyboard and right hand on the celeste, before returning to all-piano to close out his solo. He moves back and forth between the two instruments in the final reprise, throwing high accents on the celeste and closing out with a repeated high arpeggio on a suspension, as we end the side.

“I Surrender Dear” is a pure Monk solo, recorded during the December recording session. Written by Harry Barris with lyrics by Gordon Clifford, the song appears to have struck a spark in Monk’s imagination, as he covered it several times in his recording career. We get all the Monk highlights here: the shift from stride into an almost hesitating rubrato that occurs even during the first statement of the theme; the introduction of an out-of-time series of arpeggios to accent the dramatic shape of the melodic line; and of course the Monkian splatted seconds that add so much to the color of the playing. At the end, Monk seems to drift away into a reverie of a different song altogether. For a cover song, it’s as pure a statement of Monk’s method on record as I know.

“Bemsha Swing,” the other song from the second session, brings Terry’s brilliant trumpet to the group. Terry had previously played for Charlie Barnet and Count Basie, but he was in Duke Ellington’s band at the time of this recording. (He would later be in the Tonight Show band for ten years and play with Oscar Peterson for an astonishing 32 years; he’d outlive most of the players on this session, dying in 2015.) This is the only of Monk’s compositions from this record to have appeared previously, recorded for his Thelonious Monk Trio record for Prestige in 1952. Monk essays the melody as a series of rising fourths in a sort of stumbling fanfare, then firmly states it in the opening proper. There’s both stumbling (virtually, via some impressive syncopation) and firmness in what follows, particularly from Roach, who seems to be playing cymbals and snare with one hand and foot and tympani with the other hand throughout. Chambers is completely unfazed by the melodic complexity, sliding through the changes without breaking a sweat. Likewise, Rollins appears completely at home here, essaying a series of improvised double-timed thoughts that unroll as a continuous melody over the chords. Terry follows Rollins’ lead but switches it up with some longer held notes and some judicious rhythmic pauses between phrases. Monk’s solo occasions both some out-there high improvisation and some of Roach’s finest work on the record, as he alternates some fine snare work with emphatic pronouncements on the timpani, both in time and in hemiola. Chambers takes a solo that alternates walking the changes with statements of the melody, and Rollins picks things up in media res. Monk joins Rollins for the second verse of his solo with his own improv, and Terry comes in seamlessly to single the final chorus. There are many fine examples of collective improvisation in recorded jazz history, but I’m fairly certain there are no finer moments in Monk’s recordings to this point.

With Brilliant Corners, Monk had finally tipped the balance on the critical appraisal of his works, and his compositions and recordings began attracting more favorable notice. This affected not only his freedom to record but also the players he attracted. It was two short months after the April 1957 release of the record that he recorded Monk’s Music with John Coltrane and Coleman Hawkins. There followed a series of studio and live recordings for Riverside that ended in a royalty dispute. But Monk wasn’t done yet; his biggest selling recordings were ahead of him. We’ll hear one of those next week.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

BONUS: Thanks to the archival work done to assemble various biopics of Monk, we have a recording of Monk playing “Pannonica” for his patroness shortly after he wrote it, including his spoken introduction. There’s so little of Monk’s spoken voice out there that this is a rare treat indeed.