Jimmy Smith
The Sermon!

«Father Mapple stood up and, with a calm and authoritatively gentle tone, ordered the scattered people to gather. “Starboard gang, over there, draw near to port... and you on port draw near to starboard! Amidship, amidship!”»

Thus began the ninth chapter of «Moby Dick», the sermon on the Prophet Jonah in the whale's belly, the quintessential sermon in the history of literature and even in that of cinema, with none other than Orson Welles portraying the preacher in the whaler's chapel.

But this was about music - jazz to be precise - and the sermon was chanted by Jimmy Smith, an organist, and if there was one instrument that suited church environments well, it was definitely the organ.

Jimmy Smith did not play just any organ, but the Hammond, which was not a simple musical instrument but a true piece of history, to the point that rocker Piero Angela even featured it in an episode of Quark, just to share heaps of high culture.

Perhaps not everyone knows that this organ was designed by the American engineer Laurens Hammond in the 1930s to replace the pipe organs that cluttered churches and took up space from hordes of worshippers; it then gained widespread popularity in US military chapels during World War II, significantly contributing to its success in the immediate post-war period, especially in the music and jazz fields.

And if there was someone who could boast the title of godfather of the Hammond, it was undoubtedly Jimmy Smith, who first approached that revolutionary electric organ while serving in the navy during those war-torn years.

After him came the rockers, from Booker T. Jones to Al Kooper, from Brian Auger to Jon Lord, from Rick Wright to Steve Winwood; and even some lost their wits over it, like Keith Emerson and Rick Wakeman, unwittingly turning it into an instrument of megalomaniac delusions.

But before everyone and above everyone was Jimmy Smith.

Jimmy, however, once out of uniform, first turned to bass and then to piano, returning to the Hammond only in the mid-1950s, when he was recruited again, but this time in the ranks of Don Gardner's band based in Philadelphia, where Jimmy gained experience and cut his teeth before forming his own group, a trio under his name.

The beginnings of that trio didn't yield great results, except that, for a couple of weeks, a still little-known John Coltrane played with them, though he soon decided to move on, and who knows how history might have gone if he had stayed.

But Jimmy wasn't one to cry over spilled milk and just a year later - in 1956 - he secured a contract with Blue Note, who had perked up their ears and were blown away by that new sound of the trio, which wasn’t that new, really, a bit jazz, a bit blues, a bit gospel, and a bit soul; but it was new how that organ sounded and how Jimmy played it, and above all, until then, there hadn’t been a jazz group leading the way without the winds; or yes, it had been seen before, but Jimmy and his Hammond delivering fiery sermons were nonetheless a new sensation.

And when Jimmy started with his sermons, there was no way to get him down from the pulpit: so, anyone surprised that the Ramones released three albums in just over a year should consider that in two years, Smith put out thirteen, t-h-i-r-t-e-e-n, five in 1956, a staggering eight in 1957.

True, it was mostly about recording the group’s sessions and among those thirteen albums, there were about twenty original compositions by Jimmy, a significant amount; but still, they were thirteen albums, and they circulated the name quite a bit.

Then, if we talked about quality, the discussion took another turn, obviously, because you couldn’t expect to release thirteen records and find, say, a preview of «Blue Train», just to bring up Coltrane who had taken other paths.

Therefore, had he stopped after those thirteen albums, today Jimmy Smith wouldn't have a place in jazz history: he realized it himself and decided to change.

And if 1958 still recorded five albums, the first two were his undisputed masterpieces, «House Party» and especially «The Sermon!».

«The Sermon!», complete with an exclamation mark, featured three tracks - two of them originals by Jimmy - but went down in history for the first and eponymous one, a little over twenty minutes of blues-rooted music where Smith’s Hammond and Art Blakey’s drums hammered an unstoppable, irresistible basic riff while the soloists ignited the scene with high tension, with a final nod to Miles Davis's «Walkin’», out for not even a year.

Also because the soloists were allies with broad shoulders, like guitarist Kenny Burrell, trumpeter Lee Morgan, and saxophonists Lou Donaldson and George Coleman (in «J.O.S.»), and together with Jimmy, they created an album overwhelming in rhythm and passion.

Then, if you think jazz isn’t for rockers, ask Alvin Lee and Chick Churchill, who played in Ten Years After, whom they thought of when composing and playing «Adventures of a Young Organ».