Jimmy Smith - Biography
Leonard Feather nailed it in The New Edition of the Encyclopedia of Jazz when he declared that Jimmy Smith’s “relationship to previous jazz exponents of the Hammond organ parallels those of Charlie Christian and Jimmy Blanton to earlier guitarists and bassists.” Building on the foundations of jazz organ established by Fats Waller, Wild Bill Davis, and Bill Doggett, The Incredible Jimmy Smith (as he was often billed) devised a genuinely revolutionary approach to the instrument that became wildly popular from coast to coast, spawning a brand-new sound that’s been adopted by legions of crowd-pleasing organists.
James Oscar Smith was born in Norristown, Pennsylvania, on December 8, 1928. Although his year of birth is sometimes given as 1925, his stepson and onetime manager Michael Ward told Ben Ratliff of The New York Times that the later year is on Smith’s birth certificate. Smith’s father worked as a plasterer during the day and played piano at night. Smith demonstrated musical talent early on; by fourteen he was playing stride piano as well as working in a dance team that his father accompanied. He dropped out of school in the eighth grade to help his father during the day and then joined the Navy at the age of fifteen. At the conclusion of his service in 1947, he played professionally while he studied piano and bass at the Ornstein School of Music for two years, thanks to the G.I. Bill.
As a pianist, Smith joined drummer and vocalist Don Gardner's Sonotones, an R&B-flavored group that played around the Philadelphia area, in 1951. Feeling confined by the piano, Smith began to experiment with an electric organ. Smith’s earliest recordings were made with Gardner’s groups on small labels like Crown, DeLuxe, and Pickwick.
Smith made the switch to organ in 1953, and his breakthrough came in the following year. Sensing untapped possibilities in the instrument, Smith bought an organ and had it shipped to the warehouse where he and his father worked as plasterers. To gain expertise with the organ’s 25 foot pedals, he studied from a paper chart that he drew up, later claiming that he played fluently with his feet within three months. Through a lengthy process of trial and error, Smith eventually found the organ sound he was looking for.
Smith’s style included turning the tremolo off and playing single note lines with his right hand, inspired by saxmen like Coleman Hawkins, Don Byas, and Arnett Cobb, while his feet played walking bass lines on the pedals for ballads. On uptempo numbers, he would play the bass line with his left hand, reserving the pedals for emphasis. Smith started working in Atlantic City and news quickly reached bebop singer/impresario Babs Gonzales, who proclaimed Smith’s playing to be full of “futuristic, stratospheric sounds that were never before explored on the organ.” By September, Smith had formed his first trio with guitarist Thornel Schwartz and drummer Bazeley Perry. Later that year, they made the move to New York. At Gonzales’ urging, Blue Note owners Frank Wolff and Alfred Lion went to hear the group in Harlem. As Woolf later memorably described the scene, “It was at Small’s Paradise in January of 1956. He was a stunning sight. A man in convulsions, face contorted, crouched over in apparent agony, his fingers flying, his foot dancing over the pedals. The air was filled with waves of sound I had never heard before.”
Blue Note signed him immediately and got him into the studio the next month. A New Sound, A New Star, Volume 1: Jimmy Smith at The Organ (1956 Blue Note) was an important release, quickly establishing a brand-new approach to the instrument in the soon-to-be ubiquitous organ, guitar, and drums trio format. Smith’s connection to the then-nascent hard bop scene is made clear with the inclusion of Horace Silver’s “The Preacher” amid a batch of standards. A New Sound, A New Star, Volume 2: Jimmy Smith at The Organ (1956 Blue Note), with drummer Donald Bailey replacing Perry, was waxed in March and included a version of Dizzy Gillespie’s “The Champ.”
In 1957, Blue Note began recording Smith in the company of many of the label’s prominent artists. Trumpeter Donald Byrd, saxophonists Lou Donaldson and Hank Mobley, guitarist Kenny Burrell, and drummer Art Blakey joined Smith, Bailey, and new guitarist Eddie McFadden in the first of the organist’s legendary marathon sessions, A Date with Jimmy Smith, Volumes 1 & 2 (1957 Blue Note). The Complete February 1957 Jimmy Smith Blue Note Sessions (1994 Mosaic) appeared as a three disc Mosaic compilation in 1994. Over the next several years, it became standard operating procedure for the label to have guest stars on hand in addition to his regular working trio. Smith performed on over two dozen albums as a leader for Blue Note, appearing with such luminaries as trumpeter Lee Morgan on House Party (1957 Blue Note) and The Sermon! (1958 Blue Note); trumpeter Blue Mitchell and alto saxophonist Jackie McLean on Open House (1960 Blue Note) and Plain Talk (1960 Blue Note); and tenorman Stanley Turrentine on Midnight Special (1960 Blue Note), Back at the Chicken Shack (1960 Blue Note), and Prayer Meetin’ (1963 Blue Note), which turned out to be Smith’s final Blue Note recording.
Smith moved to the larger Verve Records in 1962, where he stayed for over a decade. At Verve he expanded his range to include a number of big band albums, often sporting charts by Oliver Nelson. In September 1966, Smith was paired with guitarist Wes Montgomery for the big band album Jimmy & Wes: The Dynamic Duo (1966 Verve) and the quartet-fueled The Further Adventures Of Jimmy And Wes (1966 Verve) with Grady Tate on drums and Ray Barretto on congas. Other notable albums during Smith’s Verve years include the trio date Organ Grinder Swing (1965 Verve), Peter and The Wolf (1966 Verve) with Nelson’s imaginative arrangements of Prokofiev’s famed composition, Stay Loose...Jimmy Smith Sings Again (1968 Verve), and the live album Root Down (1972 Verve).
Organ-based soul jazz, widely popular in African-American communities in the Sixties, began to lose its appeal in the Seventies. Smith moved to Los Angeles in the middle of the decade where he and his wife ran Jimmy Smith's Jazz Supper Club. He played there often and continued touring to keep the club afloat. On the recording front, Smith kept a fairly low profile, working for a variety of independent labels. Off The Top (1982 Elektra/Musician), recorded with an all-star band including Turrentine and guitarist George Benson, marked his return to the national scene. Go For Whatcha Know (1986 Blue Note), again with Turrentine plus Kenny Burrell, marked Smith’s return to the label that had made him a star. In the late Eighties and early Nineties, as the organ sound began to be rediscovered by a younger audience, Smith made a string of albums for the Milestone label including Fourmost (1990 Milestone) and Fourmost Return (2001 Milestone), two helpings from a 1990 New York club date with Turrentine, Burrell, and Tate. Smith continued to tour internationally, appearing in Europe and Japan. Blue Note issued two CDs recorded at a 1993 Japanese concert by the Smith trio with Burrell and drummer Jimmie Smith titled The Master (1993 Blue Note) and The Master II (1993 Blue Note).
In 1995, Smith moved back to Verve, where he began to record with a younger generation. Damn! (1995 Verve) featured contributions by trumpeters Roy Hargrove and Nicholas Payton, saxophonists Mark Turner, Ron Blake, Tim Warfield, and Abraham Burton, guitarist Mark Whitfield, bassist Christian McBride, and drummers Art Taylor and Bernard Purdie. In a scenario straight out of the early years with Blue Note, Smith recorded a second CD, Angel Eyes: Ballads & Slow Jams (1995 Verve), at the same sessions using Gregory Hutchinson on drums. He continued to tour, taking a break from recording until Dot Com Blues (2001 Verve), which enlisted a host of guest stars including Dr. John, Taj Mahal, Etta James, and B.B. King. Smith, who had appeared as a guest star on Joey DeFrancesco’s Incredible (1999 Concord Jazz), teamed up with his fellow organist to make Legacy (2004 Concord Jazz). The two were preparing to go on the road in support of the album when Jimmy Smith passed away in his sleep on February 8, 2005, at home in Tucson, Arizona.
Smith won a Jazz Masters Award from the National Endowment for the Arts in 2005. He established an entire sub-genre where such soul-jazz stars as Charlie Earland, Johnny “Hammond” Smith, Shirley Scott, Brother Jack McDuff, and so many others flourished. Smith’s work is also esteemed by organists as varied in style as Al Kooper, Brian Auger, and Keith Emerson. Carlos Santana says that the original Santana band “combined Olatunji with Jimmy Smith and B.B. King, and it went to a whole other place.” Jimmy Smith’s legacy is secure, and his innovations are crucial to the common language of the Hammond organ in jazz and beyond.
