jimmysmith – Jarrett House North

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: