Listening to Prestige 712: Johnny "Hammond" Smith

LISTEN TO ONE: The Stinger

 I was going to say that as we move deeper into the 1960s, there's an increasing debate as to just what jazz is, but hasn't that always been true? When Nick LaRocca and the Original Dixieland Jass Band made the first recordings in 1917, there were plenty around to say that these white boys who called themselves the creators of jazz were a pallid imitation of what Buddy Bolden had done, and what King Oliver and that Armstrong kid were doing. When critics and historians first started seriously writing defintions of jazz, in the early 1940s (no one had really done it before then), they were motivated in large part by a felt need to

create a definition that would include that new stuff by those guys who were turning chords inside out, and who, in the words of comedian Ronny Graham, "wouldn't know a melody if it hit you in the mouthpiece." In their zeal to have the new experimental sound taken seriously, the critics excluded people like Joe Liggins and Big Jay McNeely who were making records that people actually wanted to buy (a critical misstep which I have corrected in my new book, Jazz with a Beat, from SUNY Press, available to preorder from Amazon). 

Later, as the music pioneered by Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie became the mainstream, those avant garde critics became the establishment, and some of them looked with dismay at the new sounds that were being made by Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane, with even wilder young bloods like Pharaoh Sanders and Albert Ayler and James "Blood" Ulmer waiting in the wings. Hence, even though Prestige had its own free jazz practitioners in the mid-1960s, we could find, in the liner notes by Andrew Newcombe to this album, 

The music on this record--and it is music, in the full sense of the term, and in contrast to the squamose smudges of sound that have so often been passed off as jazz in recent years--testifies to the continuing validity of "good taste" as an aesthetic canon.

Definitions of good taste come and go with the years, and it's heartwarming to see how, in the face of the onslaught of a new avant garde, those definitions can be broadened in ways that the establishment critics themselves would probably be just as happy if no one pointed them out. The soul jazz organists who were coming to prominence in the early to mid 1960s were not at all afraid to get their licks, and their rhythms, from that same rhythm and blues that had been written out of the canon--and, in fact, to use some of the same musicians who had played that music.

Smith, for his sidemen on this occasion, did not dip into the Prestige (and Blue Note, and Riverside, and EmArcy, and Roulette) repertory company. His choices were mostly more obscure, although they did include an up and coming star in Houston Person, who had made his first recording with Smith two years earlier, on Riverside. Earl Edwards, Person's opposite number on tenor sax, made a couple of records with Smith and that's about all--he does appear on a record Dinah Washington made for Roulette. I can't find any other credits for drummer John Harris.

The other Smith on the album, Floyd "Guitar" Smith, is a different story. Born in 1917, he came of age in the swing era, playing with the Jeter-Pillars Orchestra and Andy Kirk's 12 Clouds of Joy, and cut his rhythm and blues teeth with a couple of the early organ guys, Wild Bill Davis and Bill Doggett. 

"The Stinger" is the title cut of the album, and it was the first 45 RPM single off the album, and--led by Floyd Smith's stinging but melodic guitar work, it is rhythm and blues all the way, with both "Hammond" and Person showing their R&B chops. This is the music that was at one time roundly denounced as "bad taste," and they do their swingin', backbeatin' best on it.

The other single off the session was "Brother John," so titled by Mr. "Hammond," but "Brother Ray" might have been a more apt title. I suppose if anyone moved the needle of rhythm and blues over from the bad taste to the good taste part of the dial, it was Ray Charles, but he still had enough bad taste to satisfy the most unreconstructed rhythm and blues fan, and so does Johnny "Hammond" Smith in this tribute to the great man.

All of this album is good, and it's varied. The standard, "There is No Greater Love," by Isham Jones (a standard! Good taste alert!) features some smooth playing by Houston Person (when you could still play smooth without playing "smooth jazz") and some tasty picking by Floyd Smith. "Brother John" is no holds barred. "Cleopatra and the African Knight," in addition to having a great title, does what the early rhythm and blues pioneers did so well--captures a big band feel with a small group. "Benny's Diggin'" weds rhythm and blues to bebop (as many of the early players did) and features some virtuoso work by "Hammond." Some top notch drumming by Harris, as well.

The soul jazz era, ushered in by Jimmy Smith, led to a lot of young keyboardists taking up the organ, and a lot of organ groups being signed to jazz labels. But just because it was a thing, that doesn't mean these young organists came out of a cookie cutter. They had individual styles and imaginations and creative impulses, and sitting down and listening to them for a while can only reinforce that realization.

"The Stinger" made up both sides of a 45. "Brother John" was backed with "Cleopatra." Cal Lampley produced. About the cover, I have nothing to say except to wonder why the Green Lantern is wearing red.