I revved up my old VW Bug in Berkeley and headed to Jimmy’s house in Sacramento for this interview in 1994. This is my writer’s copy before it was published in DownBeat.
In 1986 at the height of the synthesized keyboard craze, Jimmy Smith prophetically told a Chicago Sun-Times reporter, “It’s just a matter of time before this trend turns over, before people get tired of that damn noise and come back to the pure sound of the organ.”
Today, with the Hammond B-3’s chunky chords and burbling lines in vogue, the 66-year-old living jazz legend is still bristling over the instrument’s falling from favor for nearly two decades. Sitting in the backyard patio of his Sacramento, California home, Jimmy, who singlehandedly and explosively thrust the organ into the jazz lexicon in the mid-’50s with his innovative bop stylings, is unashamedly peppering our conversation on the Hammond B-3 renaissance of the ‘90s with plenty of I-told-you-so’s.
“I was saying synthesizers were bullshit back in 1982 when I wrote the monologue for my Off the Top album,” says Jimmy, who’s black coffee to the max with his rapid-fire responses, delightfully caustic wit and vitriol-laced critiques. “Here today and gone tomorrow just like I said then. But the Hammond will last into infinity. Those synthesizer freaks try to get the B-3 sound, but it’s too light, too weak. It’s a poor copy. When you play a synthesizer...” He searches for the right word, instead clutches his throat and starts a retching motion. He gasps out, “It makes me want to throw up.”
Then, animated with messianic zeal, Jimmy expounds on the B-3’s virtues, pausing after each attribute to make sure I’m following him. “The Hammond has body…It’s got depth…and resonance. It’s got clarity…and quality. And you can feel it. It’s not so much that you can hear it. It’s the feeling that’s important. You see, it’s like a drummer. You don’t want to hear him. You want to feel him. You can have the best drummer in the world, but if he’s too loud, he’s out of place. With the Hammond, you feel it in your bones.”
After his second morning beer, Jimmy’s gravelly voice has risen in pitch and his excitability is ready to bubble over in the same way that he erupts into a scintillating organ groove. “Look at my hands,” he says. “They’re shaking just thinking about playing. Don’t talk to me too much about my music cause I get carried away. I go off. I go completely off.”
From the sounds of it, that’s how Jimmy has always been when it comes to the keyboards. The son of a stride piano-playing father, Jimmy taught himself how to play at an early age in his hometown of Norristown, Pennsylvania where he was born December 8, 1928.
At nine, he performed a boogie-woogie piece on the popular Major Bowes Amateur Hour radio program. Jimmy remembers his winning performance well, laughing as he retells the story of how they just about had to drag him from the stage. “There I was in a pair of shorts with piano books on the seat underneath me so that I could reach the keys,” he says. “Once I got going, I didn’t stop. The announcer was saying, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, this kid’s on fire. He’s burning the place up.’ While everyone was applauding me, I kept going. My mother, who took me to the show, was off to the side telling me to get off the stage, but I wouldn’t leave.”
With show business in his bones, a few years later Jimmy was teaming with his father in a song-and-dance act while immersing himself in Art Tatum music and picking up piano pointers hanging out with Bud Powell’s kid brother Richie. “I was at Bud’s house every day,” recalls Jimmy, who, once wound up on yet another drink, takes great pleasure in recounting the tales of his youth. “He lived in Willow Grove, Pennsylvania, which is about six miles from Norristown. Richie and I’d be there early waiting for Bud to wake up. He’d get his coffee and then go straight to the piano. After a while, he stopped me from coming because I was learning too much. I figured out a couple of his tunes, ‘Loco Poco’ and ‘Glass Enclosure.’ I played them for him and I wiped them out. After that he told me to stay home.”
Copping licks from Powell came in handy years later when Jimmy, home after serving in the Navy during World War II, was in a Philadelphia club catching a Charlie Parker show. Powell was in Bird’s band but failed to show up for the early gig. “Bud was always late,” Jimmy says. “This stride piano player Fats Wright was filling in. He saw me in the audience and wanted me to play. I was good enough, but I was scared. Fats started calling, ‘Where’s little Jimmy Junior?’ Well, by then I was under the bar hiding. Finally, they pushed me up there. The first tune was ‘Lady Be Good.’ My hands were shaking, but after I got into it, I was gone. After the set Bird thanked me and hugged me. Then, who walked in but the Frantic Man himself. He asked Bird, ‘Who played? Who played? He’s not goin’ take my gig.’ But Bird just told him, ‘Shut up and play.’”
After stints in formal music education at the Halsey Music School (harmony and theory), Hamilton School of Music (upright bass) and Ornstein School (piano and theory), Jimmy joined the R&B band Don Gardner and His Sonotones in the early ‘50s. But he soon tired of pounding on the piano. “The pianos were always so out of tune it was ridiculous,” he says. “Plus, the ivory was so worn out on the keys I was
getting blisters from playing on the wood. I knew there was something better for me.” That’s when Jimmy made the trip to the Harlem Club in Atlantic City to check out Wild Bill Davis holding court on the organ. “I said that’s for me!” says Jimmy in a shout. Then he quieted his voice as if he were reliving the moment and whispers, “When he finished playing, I snuck up on the bandstand to touch the action. It was so soft. I knew I could play it.”
Jimmy borrowed money from a loan shark, bought his first Hammond B-3 and set out to teach himself how to play it. His woodshed was a small room in a Philadelphia warehouse. “Nobody was teaching organ then,” he says. “I just looked at it and thought, ‘Oh, man, this is going to be a job.’ But I liked challenges. Right off I realized I had to do something about the pedals because I didn’t want to always be looking down at them. So I had an artist from the Ornstein School make me a three-foot by three-foot chart of the pedals that I taped to the wall in front of me. Then I experimented with different stops and draw bars until finally I found the right sound, the Jimmy Smith sound, and the rest is history.”
Not only had Jimmy found his voice on the organ, but he revolutionized its use, eclipsing Wild Bill Davis’s swing-oriented style and innovatively proving with percolating foot-pedal and left-hand bass lines and lightning-fast, blues-drenched right-hand runs that the Hammond could scorch with bebop intensity.
Influenced as much by the horn playing of Illinois Jacquet, Arnett Cobb, Sonny Stitt, Dexter Gordon, Coleman Hawkins and Gene Ammons as by keyboard players, Jimmy burst into the jazz world with his guitar-drum-organ trio in 1956 when his first two albums, A New Sound A New Star and The Champ, were released on Blue Note. After two well-received live trio albums, in 1957 Smith spent three days recording music in several different ensemble configurations, which resulted in five LPs (recently
reissued with the tracks in the order they were recorded by Mosaic as The Complete February 1957 Jimmy Smith Blue Note Sessions).
Jimmy continued with Blue Note until 1962 (recording thirty discs with his steady drummer Donald Bailey and oftentimes with guitarist Kenny Burrell) when he signed with Verve, where he scored such mammoth hit albums as Bashin’, Organ Grinder Swing and two dynamic and adventurous LPs with Wes Montgomery and arranger Oliver Nelson. After his contract with Verve ended in 1968, Jimmy recorded throughout the ‘70s and ‘80s with such labels as Atlantic, MGM, Mercury, Elektra Musician and his own label Mojo. He also recorded for Milestone, which is where he issued his last three releases before returning to Blue Note for his appropriately-titled, deep-grooving new disc The Master, a trio collection highlighted by many of Smith’s greatest hits performed live in Japan and featuring guitarist Burrell and drummer Jimmie Smith (no relation).
While Jimmy takes great pride in his collaborations with Montgomery (“We locked from the moment we met”), he gets absolutely exhilarated discussing his longtime association with Burrell. “On the new album, it was like the old days,” he says. “We were feeding each other, steady feeding the whole way through. Most guitarists you gotta tell ‘em how to play. You know, play a suspension here or make a chord larger there. But not Kenny. He knows what to do. He’s a master in his own right. We burnt Japan up when we recorded this album. Everyone was hollering, even the engineers.”
Jimmy is visibly excited, tapping his fingers on the table as if he’s ready to retreat into his backyard studio near the swimming pool, switch his Hammond on and roar. When I mention how great he and Burrell sound on “Down By The Riverside” on the Verve Carnegie Hall Salutes the Jazz Masters disc, he barks, “What’d I tell you, man. Anytime we play, it’s the same thing. We were just having conversations. I feed him and he feeds me, just like I told you. Look out! We bar nobody. It’s a marriage, and we’re not talking about divorce.”
The organ was relegated to miscellaneous status in DownBeat’s critics polls until 1964 when Jimmy’s prowess on the instrument necessitated it getting its own category. The master of the Hammond B-3 has been king since that time, with such players as Jack McDuff, Jimmy McGriff and most recently Joey DeFrancesco—often credited with the organ’s current revival—periodically imperiling Jimmy’s reign.
What does he think about that? “Most of those guys were my students,” he says. “I can remember Jimmy McGriff and Groove Holmes racing over to my house at nine in the morning. They’d be outside arguing. They were crazy. I tried to get them to practice together, but they didn’t want to share anything I taught them. Jimmy learned a passage and then go home and hide. He’d lock the doors, pull the shades down, put soundproofing on the windows. They were good friends, but, man, they woke me up every morning.”
What does Jimmy think of Joey, who, I remind him, learned his tune “The Sermon” when he was five? “Come on, now, I don’t think nothing of his playing,” he says. “I taught him from when he was seven until he was fourteen. He’s playing Jimmy Smith. He says he’s not, but he lies. He’s a nice kid, but he can’t help but play me.” Tired of this line of questioning, Jimmy switches gears, telling me he has one more story to tell. Calling it his classic, he launches into his tale of the night that such jazz greats as Sonny Rollins, Hank Mobley, Art Blakey, Max Roach and Monk all came to a small club called Jimmy’s in New York to hear him shortly after The Champ was released.
Recalling it like a young kid describing a treasure, Jimmy gushes, “They thought I was overdubbing on the record because I was playing so fast, so they came to see for themselves. Well, after a while they all started coming up to play. All those horns and Art asking to take Donald Bailey’s place. The house was burning. Then Monk walks up to the bandstand, gets behind me and starts playing with me on the organ.
Man, that was the most exciting thing that ever happened to me besides being born.” Not all is so rosy, though, complains Jimmy, who’s been living the Hammond life for forty years now. He says his legs are getting worn out, his wind is shorter and his blood is thinner. He’s still gigging and even doing some recording with Us3 for its upcoming project, but he says he’s tired and wishes he had a nest egg tucked away so that he could start contemplating semi-retirement.
All this talk comes shortly before he invites me into his backyard studio—his organ sanctuary—where in the process of demonstrating just how expressive his Hammond B-3 really is, he magically rejuvenates.
In this private session, Jimmy flicks on his organ and huge Leslie speaker, settles in behind the keys and sketches an impromptu piece that starts with soulful musing and ends with passionate eruptions of molten beauty that make the windows shake. Seeing him drift off to a heavenly zone and listening to him purr-growl while playing, I realize how young Jimmy looks. With no noticeable gray hair, a still-trim body and fingers and feet that can still ignite a blaze, he could almost pass for himself, circa 1957.
With the organ vibrations humming deep inside me as he plays, I understand what Jimmy means when he says it’s not necessarily what you hear but how it feels. The Hammond may have been down for a spell, but, as Jimmy continues to testify in his shows and on disc, it’s not ready to die.
Jimmy’s wife Lola who serves as his business manager, says, give the organ master a good Hammond B-3, two Leslie Model 122 speakers, and microphones for both the tops and bottoms of the speakers and he’ll deliver the goods—that mellow and rich funky sound he’s famous for. She also notes that Jimmy owns a Baldwin piano. In his private practice studio, his Leslie speakers are housed in a cabinet built by Keyboard Products.
As for why he feels the Leslie speakers work so well with the Hammond B-3, Jimmy replies, “Because they have the beef, they have the power. With a 60-watt driver on top and a JBL on the bottom, they can break your ear drums.”
Excerpted from The Landfill Chronicles: Unearthing Legends of Modern Music by Dan Ouellette. Used with the permission of the publisher, Cymbal Press. Copyright © 2024 by Dan Ouellette.
