johnnyhammondsmith – Jarrett House North

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.)