BLP 1529

Jimmy Smith - At Club Baby Grand - Volume 2

Released - February 1957

Recording and Session Information

"Club Baby Grand", Wilmington, DE, afternoon 2nd set, August 4, 1956
Jimmy Smith, organ; Thornel Schwartz, guitar; Donald Bailey, drums; Mitch Thomas, announcer.

tk.6 It's All Right With Me
tk.9 Caravan
tk.10 Love Is A Many Splendored Thing

"Club Baby Grand", Wilmington, DE, night 3rd set, August 4, 1956
Jimmy Smith, organ; Thornel Schwartz, guitar; Donald Bailey, drums; Mitch Thomas, announcer.

tk.24 Get Happy

Track Listing

Side One
Title	Author	Recording Date
Caravan	Duke Ellington, Irving Mills, Juan Tizol	04/08/1956
Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing	Sammy Fain, Paul Francis Webster	04/08/1956
Side Two
Get Happy	Harold Arlen, Ted Koehler	04/08/1956
It's All Right with Me	Cole Porter	04/08/1956

Credits

Cover Photo:	FRANCIS WOLFF
Cover Design:	REID K. MILES
Engineer:	RUDY VAN GELDER
Producer:	ALFRED LION
Liner Notes:	LEONARD FEATHER

Liner Notes

It is characteristic of the disturbance created by Jimmy Smith in jazz circles that everyone has felt obligated to have a position concerning the contribution of this unique Hammond organ newcomer. While a vast majority has saluted him with rapturous adverbs and adjectives for his musicianship (reinforced by dollars and cents for his recordings) and a small minority has declared itself unable to see what all the excitement is about, everyone is agreed that there has been excitement.

When Jimmy came racing into the Blue Note stable, he was described ecstatically by Babs Gonzales as one whose ”dexterity on the organ is comparable to Bud Powell’s on the piano” and who possesses the only ”Oklahoma-funkish” style of comping on the blues since Charlie Christian. These assertions, borne out magnificently on BLP 1514 and BLP 1512, were further bolstered by the appearance of a new set, The Incredible Jimmy Smith, on BLP 1525.

Great as these offerings were, the latest Smithsonian contribution offers something different again: a sample of Smith on the job, conveying in person, to a fascinated night club audience, the kind of excitement that on earlier releases was reserved for Alfred Lion, Francis Wolff and engineer Rudy van Gelder, who constituted Jimmy's entire audience in the studio at the time.

The scene of the new LP was the Club Baby Grand in Wilmington, Delaware, a lively and groovy spot that caters to an audience as extrovert and susceptible to musical excitement as the Smith trio itself.

Mitch Thomas, an ardent local supporter of the new and the resourceful in modern jazz, introduces the session on the first side of BLP 1528. Mitch, best known as a disc jockey on Wilmington’s own WILM and television producer at another local station, WPFH, was one of the big boosters of the late Clifford Brown and is a leading figure in the recent organized Clifford Brown Memorial Fund. Alfred Lion was grateful for his cooperation in the recording of this session (with the technical controls in the usual capable hands of Rudy van Gelder, on a passport from New Jersey). He was also appreciative of the friendly assistance lent by Edward S. Rovner, owner of the Baby Grand.

The impression you will get from listening to these sides is that nobody was wearing white tie and tails, that there is no Prohibition in Delaware, and that everyone was enjoying himself to the utmost. I don’t know what Mr. Rovner’s arrangements are concerning cover charge, minimum, entertainment tax and other morbid details of the night club business, but it is easy to sense that the customers digging the unique Jimmy Smith sounds were well aware that they were getting value for their act.

BLP 1528

After Mitch Thomas has introduced Thornel Schwartz, Donald Bailey and Jimmy Smith individually, the proceedings get under way with a number we had been anxious to hear Jimmy play ever since Babs’ mention of it in the original liner notes. ”What I heard,” he had said, ”was a cat playing forty choruses of Georgia Brown in pure Nashua tempo and never repeating I heard futuristic stratospheric sounds that were never before explored on the organ.” Jimmy lives up to all this; I didn’t count the choruses but they can’t be far short of forty-however, the quality is far more important than the quantity, and by the time his tour de force over you are asking yourself where all the minutes and all the choruses have gone.

Where Or When reduces the tempo (there was no other way to go but down after Sweet Georgia Brown!) but keeps the beat intact with frequent recourse to a double time feel, both on the organ and on the part of Don Bailey. Thornel's guitar solo, by way of contrast, is in a somewhat simpler groove.

The Preacher has a funky repeated-rift introduction (added since Jimmy recorded it in a shorter version on BLP 1512), after which the accent is on excitement throughout. At one or two points Jimmy takes a tonic and holds throughout an entire chorus, or even two choruses, while playing a frantic, pent-up moving melody in the line below, as if impersonating at once both the preacher and the congregation. The spirit of this Horace Silver composition, with its old-timey 16-bar theme that could have been written 100 years ago, has never been more completely captured. As one enraptured customer at the club remarked, ”He takes you right into church and then takes you outside for a walk!”

Rosetta starts softly, with the guitar answering the organ-established theme and then taking over for a solo passage. Jimmy then builds up the tension, moving from octave to chord passages and making superb use of a Garner-like delayed-beat style on certain phrases, until the mood subsides again while Schwartz helps him to take it out.

BLP 1529

Caravan starts with the organ playing a repeated riff while Bailey suggests the usual Latin rhythmic touches; then Schwartz assumes the melodic obligations and later eases into some gently effective ad libbing. Then it's all Jimmy’s for a typical build-up with a grandioso, climax leading into a long ad lib cadenza for one of those suspenseful endings that have become a trademark with him.

Love Is A Many Splendored Thing, a movie title and popular theme of a season ago, is played slowly but with an ever-present beat. Jimmy has the melody for the first half-chorus before Thornel takes it away; then the Smith style sets in and, except for a brief return to the guitar, keeps the groove constant until an extra-long cadenza ending seals it off. The varying colors and shadings of Jimmy’s style, his remarkable sense of dynamics and tonal contrast, can all be discerned here at their consistently impressive best.

Get Happy, the Harold Arlen standard that has been around in both pop and jazz circles since 1929, is delivered melodically by organ and guitar, but includes also a long guitar solo in which Thornel’s flight around the changes is his most successful contribution to the session. Donald Bailey also comes in for a series of breaks toward the end.

Finally there’s the 1953 Cole Porter opus from Can Can, now rapidly assuming the proportions of a jazz standard, It’s All Right With Me. I was glad, indeed relieved, to hear Jimmy take this at a relatively moderate tempo, one that affords him plenty of chances to speak eloquently through, the mighty instrument at his disposal. This one, by the way, concludes without the expected cadenza - just stays in the same thrilling groove from start to finish.

The experience of traversing these sides with Jimmy Smith, while comfortably ensconced in an armchair beside your phonograph, is comparable with the sensation of sitting behind a picture window high in a mountain-top home during an electrical storm. What you will observe is a thing of beauty and of moods: now vivid, vital and compelling, now sensuous and dramatically tense. But if you’re afraid of heights, all you need do is step between the covers, walk into the Baby Grand and watch the show in all its grandeur.

- LEONARD FEATHER

Photo by FRANCIS WOLFF
Cover Design by REID K. MILES
Recording by RUDY VAN GELDER

RVG CD Reissue Liner Notes

A NEW LOOK AT LIVE AT THE CLUB BABY GRAND, VOL. 2

"Welcome to the jazz corner of the Delaware Valley," radio personality Mitch Thomas announces on the first of these two volumes from Wilmington's Club Baby Grand. Not exactly the epicenter of the music that was Birdland at the time, or even Café Bohemia, the scene of Jimmy Smith's first "downtown" Manhattan triumph; yet the Baby Grand was an ideal setting for a live recording by the musician who, in a few short months, had launched a Hammond B-3 revolution. Wilmington's most famous native son, trumpeter Clifford Brown, had been a classmate of Smith's at the Halsey Music School in Philadelphia, and Wilmington is not that much farther south of Philly than Norristown,PA PA (Smith's hometown) is north. Of even greater importance, the Baby Grand was the kind of place Smith had, and for some time would continue, to pay most of his working-life dues. Leonard Feather does not come out and say it explicitly, but his description of the room and its audience leaves no doubt that the Baby Grand was located in, and catered to, what at the time would have been called the Negro community - just like the Atlantic City spot where Babs Gonzales first encountered Smith, and Small's Paradise in Harlem where Smith made his uptown Manhattan debut.

Smith's meteoric success had earned him the two-volume, on-location treatment previously enjoyed at Blue Note by Art Blakey's 1954 quintet at Btrdland and the original Jazz Messengers at the Bohemia. The organist had visited Rudy Van Gelder's original Hackensack, New Jersey studios in February, March, and June of 1956 and produced three successful LPs, from which several tracks had been extracted for release as singles, a strategy repeated in the present instance. This live project, which took producer Alfred Lion and Van Gelder a bit further afield than their typical location efforts, involved the taping of two afternoon and three evening sets on August 4, 1956 not October, as stated in earlier issues of this material.

In addition to Donald Bailey, Smith's drumming mainstay throughout his Blue Note years, the trio features Thornel Schwartz. The guitarist and Smith had worked together in the Don Gardner trio where Smith made the transition from piano to organ, and Schwartz had participated in previous Blue Note efforts. While the pair would only record together on one later occasion (the 1967 Verve album Respect), Schwartz went on to accompany several organists including Johnny "Hammond" Smith, Larry Young, Jimmy McGriff, and Richard "Groove" Holmes, and to lead his own Soul Cookin 'date for Argo in 1962, There is a bit more room for guitar solos here than on previous Smith recordings, but not much. Miles Davis may have had John Coltrane, and Dave Brubeck Paul Desmond, but when Jimmy Smith was on the bandstand, he tended to be well over 90% of the show.

Lion's choice of takes from the five recorded sets suggests that Smith often saved his best for last. Three of the four tracks on Volume 2 are from the second and final afternoon set, with "Get Happy" coming from the last set of the evening. "Caravan" surprises with its guitar lead, and Schwartz also gets the opening solo, which receives an added charge from Smith's comping. The guitarist returns the favor behind an even more kinetic organ solo that displays Smith's cavalier attitude toward the tune's structure — he drops the second stanza, which results in an A-B-A solo form. Smith returned to "Caravan" in a large ensemble context with Kenny Burrell on the guitarist's 1975 Ellington Is Forever project.

"Love Is a Many Splendored Thing" had received a lot of jazz traction at the time, with previous versions by Woody Herman, Clifford Brown/Max Roach, and Joe Holiday. This may explain why it was also chosen for release as a two-part single. The reversal of Schwartz's position on the opening and closing theme choruses is a nice touch, and Smith's cadenza is more about feeling than flamboyance.

"Get Happy" is the truest band piece on either volume, with space for both Schwartz and Bailey to be heard. The guitarist may lack the fluency of Kenny Burrell, whose first effort with Smith was still six months in the future, but the soulfulness of Schwartz's work here cannot be denied.

Bailey's brushes are impressive on "It's Allright with Me," a song that Smith revisited several times on record in later years. This lengthy version contains some of the leader's most musical playing, which is strong enough to overcome the off-handed way in which the piece winds down.

— Bob Blumenthal, 2007