Jimmy Smith - Back at the Chicken Shack CD

Even though Jimmy Smith used both hands and even his feet when playing his mighty Hammond B3 organ, he single-handedly put the instrument on the Jazz-map. Born on December 8th 1925 (or 1928, as he later claimed) in Norristown, Pennsylvania, and christened James Oscar Smith, he took what little influence there was to get on the organ from Fats Waller or Wild Bill Davis and transformed the unwieldy “monster” into a swinging attraction. With a solid background in boogie-woogie piano, which even won him a radio-contest at the age of nine, and a sophisticated music education courtesy of the Royal Hamilton College of Music and the Leo Ornstein School of
Music in Philadelphia, Jimmy purchased his first Hammond-organ in 1953 and rented a warehouse to practice in. A year or so later, he emerged onto the scene as “The Incredible”: a new musical phenomenon, which everyone wanted to hear and see. When Alfred Lion of Blue Note records witnessed Smith at a club in Philadelphia in 1956, the legendary producer immediately signed him – a business relationship that lasted for a mere eight years, but produced some forty albums under Smith’s name. “The Champ”, as Jimmy Smith was also known, mostly recorded in trio-formats with a guitarist and a drummer, but also liked to play with other “funky” Jazz-stars of the time such as Lee Morgan, Lou Donaldson, Grant Green, or Stanley Turrentine. His worldwide popularity and the incredible album-sales allowed him to open up his own club in California in the Seventies, where he regularly appeared in his preferred trio-setting. After a triumphant “comeback” onto the recording-scene in the Eighties, Jimmy Smith was often asked to record with other stars like Quincy Jones and Frank Sinatra, B.B. King, Etta James, and even Michael Jackson. His influence on other organ-players is immeasurable – there was and is not a single organ-player who did not learn a thing or two from Jimmy Smith. Having been named a “NEA Jazz Master”, the highest honor available to a Jazz-musician in the US, he died on February 8th 2005.

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