BLP 4117

Jimmy Smith - Back At The Chicken Shack

Released - November 1962

Recording and Session Information

Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, April 25, 1960
Stanley Turrentine, tenor sax; Jimmy Smith, organ; Kenny Burrell, guitar #3,4; Donald Bailey, drums.

tk.3 When I Grow Too Old To Dream
tk.5A Minor Chant
tk.7 Messy Bassie
tk.16 Back At The Chicken Shack

Track Listing

Side One
Title	Author	Recording Date
Back at the Chicken Shack	Jimmy Smith	25 April 1960
When I Grow Too Old to Dream	Oscar Hammerstein II, Sigmund Romberg	25 April 1960
Side Two
Minor Chant	Stanley Turrentine	25 April 1960
Messy Bessie	Jimmy Smith	25 April 1960

Liner Notes

IN December 1962, the results of the 27th annual Down Beat Readers Poll were published. In the category designated as “Miscellaneous Instruments”, the man who polled the most votes was Jimmy Smith. It was his first poll win and the first time any organist had won in the Down Beat poll. There are many people who feel that the organ deserves a category of its own. Certainly there are a lot of organists working and recording today. The fact remains that Jimmy Smith is not only the boss of all the organists but his music is persuasive enough to outpoll a formidable collection of soprano saxists, fluegelhornists. French hornists,. etc., as well. The music in this album is no exception to that fact.

Back At The Chicken Shack features Stanley Turrentine, Kenny Burrell and Donald Bailey, along with Smith. This is he some foursome responsible for Midnight Special (Blue Note 4078 BLP4078). Both albums stem from the some session.

Smith’s title song is, as you’ve probably guessed, a blues. From the opening statement by Jimmy’s organ, you know you’re “down home”. When Turrentine’s tenor repeats the theme with him, you know you’re really there. It is not necessary to have been “down home” in a physical sense (although it helps) because if you know the feeling, through listening, everything’s all right. The unhurried, unforced solos by Smith, Burrell and Turrentine that follow, heighten the mood, increasing the intensity by slow degrees. Before the ensemble fades out, the quartet, aided greatly by Bailey’s tasteful drumming, has managed to reach the equivalent of a shout, without actually roaring.

A subtle beat and Jimmy’s sensitive chording are again present as Turrentine weaves some new strands into the old tapestry of When I Grow Too Old To Dream. Stan has one of the distinctive sounds and styles of the young tenor saxophonists to emerge in the last few years. He rolls along in a very vocal manner — you con practically hear him singing through his horn. Smith ploys two rocking choruses before Turrentine re-enters to preach a couple more and take it out. This is really Stan’s feature and he makes the most of it.

Minor Chant is one of Turrentine’s compositions. He first recorded it on his own album, Look Out’ (Blue Note 4039 BLP4039). The title is descriptively apt as the song is a minor-key, 32-bar pattern with o definite chanting quality. Things get cooking in Stan’s opening solo, even with the lugubrious note he inserts by way of a quote from the Funeral March. Smith, with Bailey booting him along, steps in and makes swinging look so easy. So many organists hvff and puff and never even get near the some results. Before the theme returns, Turrentine and Bailey exchange “fours” for one chorus.

Messy Bessie, by Jimmy. is a 32-bar, blues-inflected line with changes that bear a similarity to Charlie Parker’s Confirmation. This is especially true when Turrentine and Burrell are in the spotlight. Stan wails first; then Kenny with a low, gutsy sound in a solo that, before it is finished building, shows off his marvelous dexterity and strong, bluesy feeling. Jimmy then takes over for an outing that mixes arpeggios and riff patterns most effectively. Notice how much moro loosely he states the theme at the end of the track than he does at the number’s beginning.

When you buy a Blue Note album by Jimmy Smith, chances are you will not only get a lot of music for your money, but also a cover you con enjoy viewing many times as well. Do you remember Home Cookin’, with Jimmy standing in front of Kate’s Home Cooking on New York’s West 126th Street? Or Midnight Special, where Jimmy is hopping o freight train, luggage in hand? Both these color photos ore the work of Blue Note’s official camera man, Frank Wolff. As fine as they are, I feel that on Bock At The Chicken Shock, he has outdone himself.

This is the way it happened. One morning in the summer of 1961, Jimmy, Frank and Blue Note’s prez Al Lion, drove down to Philadelphia. This is Jimmy’s home territory (he was born in suburban Norristown) and he figured it would be appropriate for this album’s cover to be shot on a farm. “Let’s get some pictures with ‘grease’ “, was the way Jimmy put it.

After driving around for a while, they found the chicken farm of one of Jimmy’s friends. “It was o typical mid-summer day,” remembers Lion. “hot, lots of flies.” The form itself was colorful, with many varieties of roosters and hens, and the inevitable spotted dog. Jimmy sat down, his cap as relaxed on his head as he was on his rustic seat. Elsie, the dog, came right over to him to be petted, the rooster (name unknown) struck a pose, and Frank Wolff’s camera took care of the rest. The result is a warm, pictoral study that perfectly matches the music within the cardboard it adorns.

— IRA GITLER

Cover Photo by FRNACIS WOLFF
Cover Design by REID MILES
Recording by RUDY VAN GELDER

RVG CD Reissue Liner Notes

A NEW LOOK AT BACK AT THE CHICKEN SHACK

Jimmy Smith was no stranger to marathon sessions and prodigious output when he arrived at Rudy Van Gelder's studios on April 25, 1960, as several of the 17 previous album projects that Del Shields alludes to in his original notes to Midnight Special confirm. It was hardly unprecedented for Smith and his three colleagues to produce not one but two albums by the time their visit to Englewood Cliffs was complete. Even the release of Midnight Special and Back at the Chicken Shack as unaccredited but obvious companion discs could be traced back to Smith's linked jam sessions, House Party and The Sermon. What made this music unusual was the instrumentation, both planned and (one suspects) unplanned.

While the prototypical small group with organ is generally considered to contain tenor sax, guitar, and drums, this was not Smith's chosen setting. His working band was a trio sans sax; and while he had included tenor players on jam session projects where other horns also participated, his only previous quartet recordings with tenor had been a few tracks featuring Percy France on his Blue Note LP Home Cookin'. In Stanley Turrentine, Smith had the ideal tenor, and the saxophonist's contributions did much to both establish these discs as classics, and further his own nascent career. Turrentine was still in the midst of a nearly two-year tenure with Max Roach at the time, and had made his only previous appearance on a Blue Note session just three weeks earlier under the leadership of Dizzy Reece. The results of that day at Van Gelder's did not surface until 1999, on the Reece album Comin' On, but Alfred Lion was suitably impressed with Turrentine's work there to include him on the present date, which then led to a Blue Note contract and the appearance of three discs under the saxophonist's name before any of the present tracks with Smith were released.

Turrentine was clearly the right musician for Smith's first serious move into organ/tenor quartet territory — except that 40% of the music produced on April 25 is actually by an organ/tenor/drums trio. For reasons neither explained nor acknowledged in the original notes, Kenny Burrell joined the proceedings only after four tracks had been recorded. The always-busy Burrell may simply have been overbooked. Whatever the reason, his partial absence led to a mix of trio and quartet music on each disc.

"When I Grow Too Old to Dream," one of two tracks on Chicken Shack without Burrell, is a wonderful example of swinging at medium tempo, enhanced by the cut-time feeling in the theme chorus. Drummer Donald Bailey, a mainstay during Smith's Blue Note years, mixes in some polyrhythmic commentary that adds to the overall feeling in his typically unobtrusive manner. Turrentine is in the spotlight for eight of the track's ten minutes, a sign of the impression this newcomer made on the date's far from bashful leader.

"Minor Chant," the last of the trio recordings, is one of the few Turrentine-penned jazz standards on record, thanks to the performance here and his subsequent quartet recording cut two months later. The open harmonic structure of the main phrase brings the music into the modal realm still fairly uncommon among jazz groups with or without organs at the time, although the form sounds second nature in the hands of Turrentine and Smith.

The first title recorded with Burrell, '"Messy Bessie," is also the day's lengthiest. As Gitler points out, the harmonic terrain shifts into something resembling "Confirmation" (at least until the bridge) after Smith's theme statement, which echoes Horace Silver's "The Preacher" and other sanctified titles. Once again, Turrentine gets the bulk of the solo space, returning for a stirring valediction before Smith plays the out chorus with the solo changes. Formally messy, but effective.

"On the Sunny Side of the Street" followed at the session , though there was not room for it on either of the original LPs. It was not issued until 1981, when it became the title track on a collection of Smith miscellany, On the Sunny Side. The performance is in no way inferior to its more familiar mates, and gives Burrell the first solo chorus.

Recorded immediately after its companion piece, Midnight Special, the title track here is a pithier blues jam at a slightly brisker tempo. Nothing on either album is the least bit frantic, which is not to say that the music does not contain its share of excitement. Smith revisited this one a few times, including on a 1993 Blue Note reunion with Burrell, The Master, and in his final studio appearance, with Joey DeFrancesco, on the Concord album Legacy.

Gitler's remarks on the cover photo are apt if unavoidably anachronistic with their cardboard reference. Smith's wardrobe suggests that Francis Wolff did the Midnight Special cover at the same shoot.

(The companion album, Midnight Special, is also available in an RVG edition.)

— Bob Blumenthal, 2007

Blue Note Spotlight - February 2017

http://www.bluenote.com/spotlight/jimmy-smith-back-at-the-chicken-shack/

When I interviewed Jimmy Smith at his home in Sacramento, Calif., in 1994 for a DownBeat feature, he was quick to expound on the virtues of the Hammond B3 organ, which he singlehandedly took from relative obscurity (and church) into the jazz forefront, beginning with his 1956 debut A New Sound…A New Star…Jimmy Smith at the Organ Volume 1 (followed by a second volume). “The Hammond has body,” he said with messianic zeal. “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…With the Hammond, you feel it in your bones.”

Jimmy’s gravelly voice rose in pitch and his excitability was ready to bubble over in the same way that he would erupt into a scintillating organ launch. He said, “Look at my hands. 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 completely go off.”

Before Jimmy came along and made the B3 (played through Leslie speakers) a powerhouse thanks to copping licks from his Philadelphia neighbor Bud Powell (his takes on “Un Poco Loco” and “Glass Enclosure” freaked Bud out), the instrument had been largely known for Wild Bill Davis’s swing-oriented style. But Jimmy revolutionalized—and blazed a trail for other organ players—the B-3, proving with percolating foot-pedal and left-hand bass lines and lightning-fast, blues-drenched right-hand runs that the instrument could scorch with bebop intensity. (The B3 was relegated to “miscellaneous instrument” status in DownBeat’s annual Critics Poll until 1964 when it got its own category thanks to Jimmy making it popular enough to spawn a whole crew of new organ players.)

While Jimmy (named a 2005 NEA Jazz Master) became a prolific fixture as a leader on the Blue Note roster into the early ’60s and with a renewed B3 popularity even into the ‘90s, he also jumped over to Verve on to record several albums. Of all his recordings, one in particular has become heralded as an essential: his Blue Note gem, Back at the Chicken Shack, which made the cut for editor Robert Dimery’s book, 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die. On the original album cover, it states that the leader is “The Incredible Jimmy Smith.”

Recorded in 1960 (during the same studio session that also produced the equally remarkable Midnight Special album), the funky, greasy soul-jazz Chicken Shack features a young but stellar trio of players: guitarist Kenny Burrell, tenor saxophonist Stanley Turrentine and drummer Donald Bailey who steadfastly keeps the beat throughout.

While a few years later in his career, Jimmy made a couple of memorable albums with guitarist Wes Montgomery, Kenny was his man on the six strings. Jimmy told me, referring to his 1993 Blue Note album The Master, which also featured Kenny, “On the new album it was like the old days. 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…Anytime we play, it’s the same thing. [We’re] just having conversations. I feed him and he feeds me…Look out! We bar nobody. It’s a marriage, and we’re not talking about divorce.”

More than twenty years earlier, Jimmy and Kenny were still in the courting phase, but their improvisational interaction between each other on the original four-track Chicken Shack is alchemical. The same holds true for Stanley on tenor, who is actually showcased more than Kenny. The lyrical and catchy title track—composed by the leader with reference to Amos Milburn’s 1948 jump blues “Chicken Shack Boogie”—moves into a slow groove with Jimmy’s gurgling and purr-growl B-3 voicings and Kenny’s and Stanley’s simpatico solos. It’s soul musing at its best. Stanley takes the exquisite blues-fired solo lead on the swinging blues take on the Stanley Hammerstein II/Sigmund Romberg tune “When I Grow too Old to Dream,” which is followed half way through by Jimmy’s sweet but beefy stretch that makes you want to shout out.

Stanley’s mysterious and cooking “Minor Chant” gets treated to an uptempo ride with the composer belting out grooved tenor shouts followed by Jimmy’s passionate waves of B3 vibrations and Donald’s spanking solo break. The album ends with the relaxed Smith original “Messie Bessie” which features Kenny coolly playing off the rhythms Jimmy is laying down with his left hand. On the longest track on the album (12:25), Jimmy gets his chance to dance with a contagious exuberance of flame.

Not only was Chicken Shack a successful Smith outing, but it was also further testament to the power and glory of his instrument. As the B3 bomber told me much later, “[Synthesized music] is here today and gone tomorrow…But the Hammond will last into infinity.”