Creed Taylor matched two of his most famous artists, Wes Montgomery and Jimmy Smith, on this session (Montgomery's last for Verve), and the results are incendiary – a near-ideal meeting of yin and yang. Smith comes at your throat with his big attacks and blues runs while Montgomery responds with rounder, smoother octaves and single notes that still convey much heat. They are an amazing pair, complementing each other, driving each other, using their bop and blues taproots to fuse together a sound…
Compared to his earlier Blue Note recordings, organist Jimmy Smith's outings for Verve are not as strong from a jazz standpoint. Certainly his renditions of the "Theme from Joy House," "The Cat," and the "Main Title from The Carpetbaggers" are not all that significant…
Further Adventures of Jimmy and Wes picks up where Dynamic Duo left off, digging a little further into the one-time-only Wes Montgomery/Jimmy Smith sessions and coming up with more fine music – mellower in general than Dynamic Duo but first-class nonetheless…
We don’t know a lot about this album except that it was released on the Verve label in 1969 and the conductor, arranger and producer was Johnny Pate. And of course, Jimmy Smith on Organ…
Monster is an album by American jazz organist Jimmy Smith arranged by Oliver Nelson. On the Billboard albums chart, Monster peaked at number 35, and at 5 on the top R&B albums chart…
The Hammond organ, named after its inventor Laurens Hammond, debuted in 1935 as a cost-effective electro-acoustic alternative to the gigantic pipe organs mainly installed in churches. Among Hammond’s first customers were George Gershwin and Count Basie. Jazz pianists like Basie, Fats Waller, Wild Bill Davis and Milt Buckner were the founding fathers of the instrument’s international conquest, which led across all styles of popular music, from jazz to progressive rock, with its heyday in the 1960s and '70s…