Billboard : 10/20/1958
Three stars

The Smith Trio’s latest album was recorded during appearances at New York’s Small’s Paradise. Crowd noises lend an attractively informal atmosphere to the sets. Selections include ballads and swingers. D. Bailey on drums and E. McFadden on guitar offer fine rhythm support. Tunes include Laura, My Funny Valentine, and Lover Man. Good cover shot of the artist. Set should move well.

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Cashbox : 11/01/1958

This well-recorded, five-tune stint by organist Smith (cut at Small’s Paradise, a New York jazz nitery) is a genial-swing paced display of the organ at its jazz best. Smith knows the jazz capabilities of the instrument, and he employs them with remarkable deftness. Guitarist Eddie McFadden and drummer Donald Bailey on sure-handed support. Sturdy jazz inventory.

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Down Beat : 11/27/1958
Don Gold : 2 stars

In his linter notes for this LP, Leonard Feather calls attention to what he terms Smith‘s “Sputnik-like, Morse code solos.”

Although I might not have stated it in such terms, I do tend to feel that Smith’s approach to his instrument is barely related to the potential and basic capacity of the instrument itself.

Like, you know, if I want to hear a telegrapher I’ll make it down to a Western Union office. Or if I want to revisit Bird, I’ll listen to records by Bird or any one of his disciples.

The point is that it seems absurd to me to utilize saxophone conception on an instrument of the organ’s scope, as Smith does here. I have heard Smith on previous occasions and know that he can weave chordal patterns and single-note lines. He does very little of this hear and what emerges is a kind of mockery of the Bird-influence, a form of tasteless exhibitionism that substitutes fleetness for fluency.

Although the first four tunes ordinarily are thought of as ballads, they are barely balladic in nature here, as Smith indulges in banal fireworks. McFadden does not completely succumb to this frenetic pace and makes some sense, although he, too, becomes drearily monotonous on Indiana, on which he has an extended solo.

Bailey manages to resist being overwhelmed by the organ sound and contributes intelligently.

Despite the fact that Smith pauses during this race to inject several ideas worth hearing, this LP, for the most part, is an exasperating test of the listener’s tolerance. Only Smith’s occasional moments of enlightenment and McFadden’s ability make this worth hearing.

I know that Smith can produce LPs of greater value.

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Liner Notes by Leonard Feather

This album was recorded in Harlem. The fact may seem irrelevant and inconsequential to some; for others, more familiar with the signal role played by this area in the development of jazz, it will have a unique nostalgic significance.

Most of today’s fans are too young to have known Harlem as a fountainhead of jazz; yet in the 1920s, during the first years after the district had become and almost exclusively Negro neighborhood, Harlem was to the jazz world what Greenwich Village was to the aspiring writer or painter. More than that, to the average visitor from downtown it was a slightly exotic offbeat center of entertainment, a show-business nursery in which were developing the talents that were to become global names, the Josephine Bakers and the Florence Mills.

In this section of Manhattan, beginning where Central Park ends at 110th Street and stretching north some 45 blocks, generally somewhere between Fifth Avenue and St. Nicholaus, could be found, if your guide knew the ropes, some of the private joys of the era’s music seekers: the home-cooking, sneaky-pete wine, bathtub-gin sessions, the rent parties, the spontaneous cutting contests at which men like The Beetle (see here) and James P. Johnson and Duke Ellington and Willie The Lion Smith would share the music and the liquor and the kicks of the night, well into the bright daylight of the next restless day. In this section, too, were the more formal faces of Harlem’s music, the theatres and the dance halls and the cabarets. In some of these, the white visitor often was a lone intrude; in others, ironically, Negroes actually were discouraged as patrons and white business was cultivated exclusively.

During the 1930s, as prohibition ended and gangster control weakened, democracy took a foothold and Americans of every shade mingled more freely at the Savoy Ballroom on Lenox Avenue at 140th Street became New York’s rhythm vortex. Here the dancing was as incredible as the music; here the seeker after that elusive commodity called jazz could find it in the engagingly loose-jointed brass and reed and rhythm sections of bands led by Chick Webb or Jimmie Lunceford, Teddy Hill or Benny Carter or Willie Bryant. And there were always the little bars and grills and late spots; Pete Brown might be at the Brittwood next to the Savoy and Dickie Wells might have a crazy little kazoo band at his after-hours joint. The theatres, too, had elaborate shows with name bands and lines of girls; the Apollo and the Harlem Opera House and others vied for attractions.

Harlem still held on to a measure of its glory after the ’30s, though the music was moving downtown while the patrons from uptown, finding the Jim Crow ropes slowly disappearing, followed the music to 52nd Street. The club business was shaky and the Savoy was losing its grip, but there were still surprises to be found in a score of unpublicized retreats. Who remembers the spot where Frankie Newton had that fine little band? Or the club for which Bill (Bojangles) Robinson acted as front man, and the tall and lovely Louise McCarroll, with the deep contralto voice, who sang in the show? Wasn’t that the Mimo Club? And wasn’t it at the Elks’ Rendezvous that Louis Jordan‘s band started the whole cycle of rhythm-and-blues, 15 years before the public heard it in the debased form known as rock ‘n’ roll? How about the nights of those early harmonic and rhythmic experiments with Monk and Diz and Klook and Christian at the Play House? And what was the name of that little joint on Sugar Hill, the St. Nicholaus Avenue bar next to the spot where Timmie and Inez had the hippest record shop in town?

All this happened many years ago and the picture has blurred; Harlem has blurred too, but it is still possible to look back gratefully to the contribution its denizens made, and to assess the part it played in nurturing good music through a phase when there were no Carnegie Hall concerts, or Newport festivals, or even Blue Note records, to act as its propaganda agents.

Brightest of all the memories, because they blazed with the brightest lights, are the three big show spots of Harlem. They were the Cotton Club, where Duke Ellington and Cab Calloway had the best-recommended big bands; Connie’s Inn, home base of Fletcher Henderson‘s glory; and Smalls’ Paradise. And despite the fame of the other two, the greatest of these three, in many ways, was Smalls’.

Originally Ed Smalls had opened a spot at Fifth Avenue and 135th Street. Bill Basie played piano there, and Clare Smith sang while the youthful Count played, and Ethel Waters was around; and in 1926 Smalls’ moved across town to the basement at Seventh and 135th, in the same building of which the club now occupies the main floor. It was there that Bix Beiderbecke would most often be found hanging out; there that all the ofay trombone players, from Jack Teagarden on down, would come to listen to the fabled youngster named Jimmy Harrison; there that Elmer Snowden‘s band introduced many New Yorkers to the revolutionary styles of Big Sid Catlett, Roy Eldridge, Chu Berry; there, too, that Luis Russell brought his bandful of King Oliver alumni.

John Hammond, who made his first contacts with jazz through such excursions, remembers that the musicians all felt more at ease visiting Smalls’ because, unlike the other Harlem showplaces, it was Negro-owned and did not dally with racial discrimination; anyone who could pay his check was welcome.

There was always a big show at Smalls’; everything was big but the prices. A menu I saved as a souvenir of my first visit – with Mac and Mezz Mezzrow, a couple of years after Prohibition ended – reminds me that there was no cover or minimum, that whiskey was 50 cents at the tables, a cocktail 60 cents and sirloin steak $1.50. (Of course I was much too young to drink.)

As business slowed down and the war years brought a curfew law, Smalls’ lost ground, finally cutting its show presentations to weekends only. A few years ago Ed Smalls sold out; he now owns a liquor store uptown. Today the management is headed by Gene Tyler, through whose cooperation the present album was recorded on the spot.

The use of Jimmy Smith‘s Trio is an extension of a musical revival that has been in slow but sure progress at Smalls’ for the past few years. Marlowe Morris was the first to introduce the Hammond organ to the club, in an engagement that ran from 1953 well into 1955. The quality of the visiting combos since then has remained high. The club now functions, as in the old days, on the basis of a music-all-week-long policy. Oscar Pettiford, Art Blakey, Jo Jones and other contemporary jazz names have headed groups dominating a bandstand now straddled halfway between the congenial bar at the entrance and the large room (complete with dance floor) in the rear.

If you live in, or visit, the Harlem area today, you may find rock ‘n’ roll in the saddle at the Savoy, or even at the Apollo, scene of the one remaining stage presentation; but chances are better than even that you will find Harlem’s best jazz at Smalls’, where so many of the antecedents of this same music kept an earlier bandstand swinging when the 32-year-old Jimmy Smith was an infant in Philadelphia.

This is the first record album ever recorded at Smalls’. I was lucky enough to be present the night it was recorded. It seems to me that some of the relaxedly friendly atmosphere of the club is transformed into the grooves of this disc, and that Jimmy and Eddie and Donald were playing their best that night. If they knew the traditions of the happy half-acre that was the site of their performance that night, they could hardly have done less.

After Hours goes straight down the blues path, slowly and determinedly, like a streetcar named Despond, then builds into a long solo vehicle for Jimmie and McFadden. It’s strange that they have chose to name it after the Avery Parrish piano solo that originated in the Erskine Hawkins band in 1941, for actually the trio itself composes this performance most of the way; for a more exact reflection of the Parrish original, check with Jutta Hipp on BLP 1516. Notice how surreptitiously drummer Donald Bailey eases into double time during the guitar solo.

After After Hours, some naïve feminine voice in the audience can be heard calling for I Can’t Give You Anything But Love. Jimmy blithely responds by offering her a valentine – a big and tender bouquet with one of those incredible protracted Smith finales.

Slightly Monkish, it need scarcely be pointed out, is a tribute neither to Julius Monk nor to Monk Montgomery, but rather an expectedly dissonant and provoking echo of Thelonious. Laura is a lady of many moods, now gentle, now maestoso, with some magnificent moments immediately following the guitar solo.

Imagination is introduced by a paraphrase of the melody, with many elaborations, in a fast one-note-line solo by Jimmy; Eddie has the first completely ad lib chorus, though both soloists are duly represented at considerable length. Guitar introduces the melody of Just Friends at medium bright tempo in a version that strikes me as the most exciting and jazz-valid since Bird‘s. Lover Man has another of those Sputnik-like Morse-code solos by Jimmy, leading into a more subdued mood conjured up by McFadden.

Body and Soul, after a long and suspenseful introduction, has some typical contrasts: examine the wild forays in the second eight against the comparative simplicity of the first, or the division of the release into four simple measures followed by four highly complex. Indiana is mostly Eddie McFadden’s outing, and one that should enable the experts to bear him in mind when voting time comes around in the next critics’ poll. He has technique, imagination and something else that I once saw neatly described, in a happy typographical error, as “fagility” – facility with agility. Donald Bailey’s snare punctuations contribute much to the impetus of this stimulating performance. Jimmy goes out in a sudden ending with a flat fifth.