Billboard : 05/26/1956
Score of 76

In New York this past winter, Smith occasioned much interest with his unusual jazz work on the Hammond organ. Count Basie and others have found this instrument to have possibilities from a rhythm point of view; few has explored it tonally or coloristically, however. This is Smith’s discovery. The contrasting timbres, clean phrasing and unmuddled modern harmonies he achieves are commendable, considering how the instrument trends to resist just such exploitation. Other than Deep Purple, Moonlight in Vermont, and Gillespie‘s The Champ, Smith uses only his own material.

—–

Down Beat : 05/26/1956
Nat Hentoff : 3.5 stars

This is the first LP by 30-year-old organist Jimmy Smith, who recently has had successful New York engagements at Small’s Paradise and Café Bohemia. Potentially, Smith could be the first important modern jazz organist. Although Bill Doggett and Wild Bill Davis are capable of playing good jazz when they choose and Dick Hyman is tasty, when he chooses, Smith is the first Bird-sent wailer on the instrument.

He plays the organ – on up-tempos – like a horn out of the hard school of bop, and he swings – on – uptempos – with ferocious conviction. It is this smashing intensity and ability to sustain his unremitting drive that make Smith so powerful a projectile. He needs, however, to expand his range of dynamics on up-tempos and to pay more care to developing his horn-like ideas further.

The reason for the middling rating is Smith’s considerable difficulties jazzwise with ballads. on the four slow-tempo numbers in this set, he plays with the kind of heavy drama that smacks of movie scores and soap operas and that lacks subtlety of conception and rhythmic flow. He needs a much lighter touch on ballads, a much more mature taste, and again, a more sensitive feel for dynamics. I question whether most of his ballad interpretations on this LP qualify as jazz at all.

He is accompanied by drummer Donald Bailey and guitarist Thornel Schwartz. Schwartz swings strongly with earthy force on the up-tempos but he often plays the ballads with schmaltz, but not nearly so much as Smith does. The set should be heard on a really good hi-fi set for Smith’s up-tempo impact to be appreciate fully, since the organ is hard to reproduce well on an ordinary machine. I’d like to hear Smith on a real organ some time, for I still cringe at the sound of an electrical organ, even when said instrument is swung.

—–

Liner Notes by Babs Gonzalez

It isn’t very often that a musician possessing that rare quality of creative genius coupled with “volcanic fire” makes an appearance on the musical scene. In my entire career in the music field I had only felt that “fire” when listening to Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Freddie Webster, Charlie Christian and Bud Powell.

Jimmy Smith has definitely joined this immortal group which was and still is vital to the survival of Modern Jazz. His dexterity on the organ is comparable to Bud Powell‘s on the piano and he possesses the only “Oklahoma funkish” style of comping on the Blues since Charlie Christian. He is probably the first organist who plays the instrument with a modern conception and he has developed a sound all his own. The modern musicians are definitely in Jimmy’s corner. When he played recently at Small’s Paradise, the back-room was crowded nightly with “cats” to dig the “Smith” sounds. In everything he touches his musical genius makes itself felt. It doesn’t matter if he plays a funky Blues, a hard-swinging number or a slow ballad.

Born in Norristown, PA, Jimmy studied the piano under his father, a piano teacher. He “gigged” around Norristown and Western Pennsylvania from 1941 to 1951, finally settling in Philly. There he met all the touring “great cats” and decided he’d need more musical schooling. For two years he attended Halsey Music School majoring in Harmony and Theory along with a guy named Clifford Brown.

After completing his schooling he began playing “gigs” again, and when one night in 1953 he heard Wild Bill Davis, he decided then and there that the organ was for him. For the next year he gigged on piano by night and practiced the organ by day.

Early in 1954 he joined the Don Gardner Quartet for a tour of the Rhythm and Blues circuit, but the constant demand for commercialism was destroying his creativeness. So, in 1955 he left the group to go out again as a single.

Last summer he opened at a club in Atlantic City. He didn’t need any “tubs” because all the drummers there were lined up nightly waiting for a chance to play with him. Within three days the news reached me about this “insane” organist and I drove down to “dig” for myself.

What I heard 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. I was supposed to see a host of “cats” that night, but all I did was “lay dead” because every cat in town made it by Jimmy’s “gig” during the night.

As you are digging the album, Jimmy will already have two New York engagements under his belt: one at Smalls’ Uptown and one at Café Bohemia, the progressive spot in the Village.

On these LP’s Jimmy is ably assisted on guitar by Thornel Schwartz, a real swinging cat. They are sound twins on the bandstand and are always singing new arrangements in the car while traveling. Bay Perry, brother of the late Ray Perry of sax fame, was used on BLP 1512, while Donald Bailey, Jimmy’s regular drummer, supplies the rhythm on BLP 1514. I am very proud to have the opportunity to write these notes on such a great artist, who — like so many others before him — makes his debut on Blue Note. VOILA!