Unromantic as it sounds, part of Jimmy Smith’s conversion to Hammond organ in the early '50s was because he got sick of playing pianos that weren’t in tune. “You never knew what you were gonna get in those clubs,” Smith told an interviewer shortly before his death in 2005. “I knew a lot of cats who carried a tuning fork with ’em and tuned the piano on opening night if they had to. The organ,” he added, “it never goes out of tune.” Convenience—it may not be as good a story as inspiration, but it holds weight.
If Smith’s first two albums redefined what the Hammond could do in a jazz context, his third (Blue Note 1525, often titled The Incredible Jimmy Smith at the Organ) found him settling into his niche. Genetically speaking, the inspiration here lay in combining bop—heady, dense, virtuosic—with the earthy familiarity of gospel and R&B, a move that brought the former down to earth and made the latter sound arty and au courant.
Still, Smith manages a surprising variety and range: the exotic, chaotic “Judo Mambo,” an elegiac “Willow Weep for Me,” an “I Cover the Waterfront” that somehow sounds happy. Most interesting is his take on Thelonious Monk’s “Well You Needn’t,” which sands the jagged edges of the original into a smooth, almost noirish groove—an arrangement that proves not only Smith’s wit as an interpreter, but also his ability to take repertoire that seemed existentially inseparable from the piano and make it work on an entirely different instrument—one that stayed in tune.