Passing away of a pioneer
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Jimmy Smith, the pioneer who turned the Hammond B-3 electric organ into a significant jazz instrument, died recently. JAZZEBEL pays a tribute
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Smith's career started a little late, his performing and recording debut coming at the age of 30. — Photo: AP
THE OBITUARIES came out two days after the event and hardly made their way into newspapers around the world. They were almost as quiet as his death. Jimmy Smith, the pioneer who turned the Hammond B-3 electric organ into a significant jazz instrument, was found dead in his sleep on February 8, two months after his 79th birthday.
Literally, he died in bed, but figuratively he died with his boots on. For the last couple of years he had been playing organ duets every Sunday with Joey DeFrancesco, 45 years his junior.
Their recording Legacy was due out on February 15 and they had planned a national tour together.
DeFrancesco said it all: "He went out at the top of his game." He quoted Miles Davis as having called Smith "the eighth wonder of the world."
That might sound like extravagant praise for a musician who wasn't half as widely known as Davis himself, not to mention Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Duke Ellington or Louis Armstrong. But what Smith did for the jazz organ was as pioneering as what Parker, John Coltrane, or Art Tatum did for the alto saxophone, the tenor saxophone or the piano.
Late beginning
Smith's career started a little late, his performing and recording debut coming at the age of 30. But he had started off as a pianist. At 25, he discovered the organ when he heard Wild Bill Davis, the then king, playing it.
The Hammond B-3, invented for use in small, black community churches with too little space for the original thing, had gone into service with gospel music and from there into blues and R&B. Most jazz organists, including part-timers such as Fats Waller and Count Basie, had kept it essentially a simple instrument, primarily for the jazz blues.
Smith maintained the primacy of the blues, but, coming to the organ in the age of be-bop and hard bop, he developed complex melodic patterns for solo improvisations to match what the be-bop pioneers had done on other instruments.
While his left hand beat out booming but fairly simple chords, often sounding whiplash-like, his right hand flew over the keyboard in long, tireless melodic sequences to match anything a Gillespie, a Parker or a Coltrane might produce.
And then there was his work on the pedals to produce the accompanying lines of bass notes that enabled him to dispense with a bassist and work in a trio with a drummer and a guitarist.
From such trios to bigger groups, including, especially, tenor saxophone but also alto sax and trumpet, or even in the big bands that he worked with in the '60s, any ensemble that included Smith was dominated by him. The Incredible Jimmy Smith, as they called him, churned out a series of brilliant albums, from A New Sound, a New Star through Back at the Chicken Shack to Organ Grinder Swing.
In Damn! recorded 10 years ago, he led a band of rising young stars, including Roy Hargrove and Nicholas Payton on trumpet, Tim Warfield on tenor sax, and Christian McBride on bass. It's a showcase for them: they take all the solos. And yet Smith's distinctive organ sound is the most striking voice on the album.
He was passing the torch on to them, as he has been doing to DeFrancesco.
Whenever they performed together recently, he had to be helped on stage; he walked slowly, bent over. The years showed on him.
Until he started playing. Then they seemed to fall off magically and suddenly he would be as young as his 33-year-old colleague.
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