BLP 1556

 The Sounds Of Jimmy Smith

Released - 1957 / 1959

Recording and Session Information

Manhattan Towers, NYC, February 11, 1957
Jimmy Smith, organ; Eddie McFadden, guitar; Art Blakey, drums.

tk.6 Zing! Went The Strings Of My Heart

Manhattan Towers, NYC, February 12, 1957
Jimmy Smith, organ; Eddie McFadden, guitar; Donald Bailey, drums.

tk.4 Somebody Loves Me

Manhattan Towers, NYC, February 13, 1957
Jimmy Smith, organ; Eddie McFadden, guitar #3,4; Donald Bailey, drums #3,4.

tk.4 All The Things You Are
tk.5 The Fight
tk.7 There'll Never Be Another You
tk.12 Blue Moon

Session Photos

Eddie McFadden, February 12 1957

Track Listing

Side One
Title	Author	Recording Date
There Will Never Be Another You	Mack Gordon, Harry Warren	13/02/1957
The Fight	Jimmy Smith	13/02/1957
Blue Moon	Lorenz Hart, Richard Rodgers	13/02/1957
Side Two
All The Things You Are	Oscar Hammerstein II, Jerome Kern	13/02/1957
Zing Went The Strings Of My Heart	James F. Hanley	11/02/1957
Somebody Loves Me	Buddy DeSylva, Ballard MacDonald, George Gershwin	12/02/1957

Credits

Cover Photo:	HAROLD FEINSTEIN
Cover Design:
Engineer:	RUDY VAN GELDER
Producer:	ALFRED LION
Liner Notes:	LEONARD FEATHER

Liner Notes

Looking at Jimmy Smith in the daytime, his legs straddling a piano bench as he listens to his latest LP, his business suit enveloping a white turtleneck sweater, you might sooner place him as a bantam-weight contender than as the world's greatest jazz organist. Watching him work at night, crouched over the organ, fingers and feet moving at incredible speed, you know him for what he is - a musician dedicated, inspired, possessed, a craftsman in whom the spirit moves with baffling celerity and entrancing complexity.

If a parallel must be drawn, and I doubt it, Jimmy Smith may be called the Bud Powell of the organ. There could be logic in the analogy, for his own hometown, Norristown, PA, is a few miles from the Powell family demesne in Willow Grove. "l knew Bud and his brother well; in fact, Richie and I used to play cowboys together. I would go over to their place every day and Bud would make fun of Richie and me, saying we wouldn't learn. But he thought I had more spunk than Richie, because Richie was dilatory and I at least wanted to learn. But I watched Bud, and dug his hands, and marveled at that unique attack he always had."

As a pianist Jimmy developed a not inconsiderable attack and technique of his own, which went to waste in the dreary tours of rhythm and blues gigs that engaged too much of his time during the first decade of his career.

His career as a Hammond organist did not begin until 1955, when he was 28. "I'd split the band I was with," he recalls, "and I was on my own, not working anyplace as a pianist. I tried to get others to teach me organ, but either they didn't have time or they were going out of town or something, so I had no training at all, formal or informal. I taught myself."

Jimmy's approach to self-tuition was an impressive demonstration of perseverance. "I made a deal with a studio in Philadelphia where they sell organs, and they let me practice there for a dollar money for a down payment on my own organ. I got a Hammond B-2 model, which cost about $3,600 Today I have a B-3, which has four extra percussion stops.

"Well, when I finally got my own organ I put it in a warehouse and I took a big sheet of paper and drew a floor plan of the pedals, the same as you would draw a chart of the vibes. Anytime I wanted to gauge the spaces and where to drop my foot down on which pedal, I'd look at the chart.

"1 was paying a guy about five bucks to let me spend three hours a day stuck in the back of that warehouse, because I couldn't take the organ anywhere else in the neighborhood. Sometimes I would stay there four hours, or maybe all day long if I'd luck up on something and get some new ideas, using different stops. I was staying alone in a hotel in Philadelphia at Broad and Poplar. I'd eat breakfast and then take my lunch to the warehouse with me, and stay there until I was satisfied that I'd done what I needed to for that day.

"You know, you just don't sit down at the organ and play it simply because you happen to know how to play piano; because the main thing is keeping a good bass line, just like a good bass fiddle would play. I had two years of double bass in school, so I knew just how that bass line is supposed to run and how to make it come out even with my solo. Everything has to tell a story, and the bass and the hands have to mesh.

After emerging from close to three months' isolation in the warehouse, Jimmy felt he was ready, and before long he opened at a nightspot in Atlantic City. Now he had to face the additional problems of physical transportation for his cumbersome plaything. At first he had no facilities at all. Today he has an elaborate truck equipped with hi-fi, radio, two speakers, and all necessary comforts. He is enough of an engineer to save service charges and take care of emergencies himself if a tube blows out or a wire needs soldering on the organ.

"I worked as a single at first," he says, "then the word began to get around, and soon I was able to carry a guitar player and drummer along with me. What I had was more or less a different approach. I wanted to play the same style I played piano, and keep my contrary-bass motions running. Another thing about my identity — you know how Bags plays, he has that very slow vibrato. Well, I have three different vibratos that I can use, and I have to cut all three of them down to get close to that sound of Bags's."

Another of the unique Smith sound effects is achieved by use of the drawbars, whose eight extensions raise the overtones a fourth or a fifth at a time. Jimmy will often use, say, three flutes and one string stop, with four overtones on top, and, pulling the drawbars all the way out, he will get the effect of a four-octave unison, which to the untrained ear sounds like a ghostly parallel line to his solos, so high as to be almost at the edge of aural observance.

"There Will Never Be Another You," which opens this session, mainly employs four string stops and one flute stop, with an attractive trill effect. Dramatic use of brass stops heightens the excitement toward the end.

"The Fight" is one of the most unusual and provocative of Jimmy's experiments. An unaccompanied organ solo, it encompasses a bewildering variety of harmonic effects. One of these passages, with the whole-tone scale implications against the pedal-point seconds, originally suggested the title, "The Elf's Dance." "It's easy," smiles Jimmy. "The whole thing was just built around a bunch of progressions. There's a chant, then something that's more like a march, and if it sounds like a church organ at times here, that's because I am using more or less a churchy vibrato, a C-3, which gives you that chamber effect. The piece wasn't written completely in advance; I just set a pattern of chords in my mind and worked around them."

"Blue Moon" returns to the trio format, using stops similar to those employed on the first track. Again, the sympathetic cooperation of Eddie McFadden, the Baltimore-born guitarist who joined the Smith trio in January 1957, is an important factor in both solo and ensemble capacities.

"All the Things You Are" is another astonishingly unaccompanied Smith performance. "I took part of the introduction from Ravel, with a touch of Johann Sebastian for flavor," he explains. After the long and suspenseful introduction, the melody is played in 3/4; the second chorus eases into four, though there is a generally ad lib atmosphere that makes time values secondary. Jimmy's capacity for dramatically surprising endings is again demonstrated as he concludes this A-flat performance with an F major seventh.

"Zing! Went the Strings of my Heart" has the piquant added attraction of the presence of Art Blakey in place of Jimmy's regular drummer, Donald Bailey. Taken at the kind of gait (Babs Gonzales called it "pure Nashua tempo") challenge few musicians since Charlie Parker been able to meet successfully, it uses three flutes and one string stop with the four-octave overtone unison described previously. That Jimmy can improvise, and improvise creatively at this tempo, becomes even more incredible if you try tapping your foot to it, and bearing in mind the fact that his own left foot was going in four throughout. A highlight of the performance is a series of eight-bar trades with guitar and drums; another is the sudden crash-landing at the end.

"Somebody Loves Me" returns to the regular trio personnel at a tempo that is actually medium-fast, though after "Zing" it seems practically funereal. Jimmy used just three flute stops and no strings on the first chorus.

I have taken the liberty of divulging a few technical secrets for the first time in these notes, because it would appear to me that nobody, even when equipped with the technical know-how, is likely to catch up with Jimmy, who's off to something considerably more advantageous than a head start. Nevertheless he has already given rise to the inevitable flock of imitators, and has some philosophical comments of his own on them. "So many guys are having trouble because a lot of them ore trying my style on the organ. I've worked in Columbus, Ohio, and when I went back there, they had about 18 organ players."

The past year has seen the beginning of an era of esthetic and economic security for Jimmy. Though his television and radio exposure has been virtually nil, the fast-expanding library of his Blue Note records has served both as the cause and effect of his increasing audiences. Along with public acceptance comes personal security: last March, Jimmy was married to a Germantown, PA high school music director, who has also had several years of voice coaching and does concert work.

In November of 1957 his van stopped outside Birdland and deposited the organ there for a triumphant two-week engagement. Jimmy Smith's philosophy has reaped the returns he predicted for it when he first withdrew into the seclusion of that Philadelphia warehouse less than three years ago. "Some people called me crazy," he says. "They said I'd never get anywhere with it, but I stuck with it. I'm sure glad I did!"

— LEONARD FEATHER
(Author of The Book of Jazz)

Photo by HAROLD FEINSTEIN
Recording by RUDY VAN GELDER

RVG CD Reissue Liner Notes

A NEW LOOK AT THE SOUNDS OF JIMMY SMITH

Nearly a half-century after they were written, Leonard Feather's original liner notes still provide the best single source on both the development of Jimmy Smith's phenomenal organ technique and how he produced an array of his trademark sonic effects. What Feather neglected to discuss — primarily because most albums tended to presented as freestanding individual projects — was the unusual series of recording sessions that produced not just the present LP, but four others within the space of three days.

1956 had been Smith's breakthrough year, the year in which he signed a Blue Note recording contract and taped five albums with his working trio. As 1957 began, that trio included drummer Donald Bailey in the second of his eight years with the organist, and new guitarist Eddie McFadden, who would remain in the trio through 1959. In an effort to do more than simply supplement Smith's already burgeoning trio discography, producer Alfred Lion decided to schedule three consecutive days of recordings in the Manhattan Towers studios (with Rudy Van Gelder making a rare studio trip outside of New Jersey) to feature Smith in a variety of contexts with both his regular accompanists and a rotating cast of five guest stars. The project was unprecedented in Blue Note history, with personnel added and subtracted as each day's session progressed; and while different core personnel defined each of the three sessions, Lion's indifference to discographic coherence led to four of the five resulting albums containing music from more than one of the three days.

The project began on February 11, 1957, with Smith and McFadden joined by Donald Byrd, Lou Donaldson, Hank Mobley, and Art Blakey. While the sextet music appeared on the two-volume A Date with Jimmy Smith, two tracks without the horns were also taped and appear in the present collection. One of these, the bonus cut "First Night Blues," comes from early in the session and provided a comfortable introduction to new guitarist McFadden, who gets into the Charlie Christian side of his style and, at chorus 13, offers the displaced repetitions that would become identified with a later Blue Note star, Grant Green. Smith's organ solo is virtuosic blues playing on par with his early hit "The Champ," and demonstrates the instant rapport he established with Blakey. The unaccompanied coda is another sign of Smith's originality.

What purports to be "Zing! Went the Strings of My Heart," also from February 11th, was included on the original Sounds of Jimmy Smith LP; but "Zing" is a 56-bar form whereas the present 32-bar, A—B—A—C structure sounds like a cut-and-paste amalgam of "Zing," "Falling in Love with Love," and "Indiana." Whatever one chooses to call this track, it is an exciting romp at the way-up tempo that both Smith and Blakey relished. One wonders if Lou Donaldson's presence inspired Smith to preempt one of the saxophonist's favorite quotes, '"Donkey Serenade."

February 12th saw Smith's working trio plus Blakey, Donaldson, and Kenny Burrell recording in a variety of combinations. Most of the resulting music appeared on another two-volume set, Jimmy Smith at the Organ. The only track from that date heard on Sounds was "Somebody Loves Me," by the working trio. The band's expert reading of the arranged opening chorus reveals the confidence bred through steady work, with Bailey's fills crisp and in the flow.

The rest of the present album was produced on February 13th, and (with the exception of a Smith/Blakey duet, "The Duel," included on At the Organ, Volume 2) was confined to the working trio. Little need be added to Feather's remarks on the four originally-issued tracks, save for the information (courtesy of Bob Porter) that "The Fight" was created to memorialize Smith's parting of the ways with former manager Babs Gonzales. The remaining two bonus tracks here represent the first and last music recorded that day. "The Third Day" started the session, and is a relaxed 32-bar melody that finds Smith tossing off harmonically audacious ideas without breaking a sweat. "Cherokee," the final product of the three-day marathon, is a fine example of the interplay the trio generated. McFadden plays one of his best recorded solos, Smith uses colors to great effect without changing the organ stops, and Bailey gets eight bars to himself on the concluding bridge. Keeping this excellent performance out of circulation for 37 years (it first appeared in a Mosaic boxed set) was an obvious oversight, but perhaps an understandable one given Smith's bounteous output.

— Bob Blumenthal, 2005