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On this date in 1928 the master of the Hammond B3, Jimmy Smith was born. I have been listening to Jimmy Smith’s music since he late 60s when I discovered Wes Montgomery and then Jimmy & Wes an album by the two masters that they released in 1966. I love to put on a Jimmy Smith album at work and well just let it flow!! So let’s have some morning music to start our Sunday and to honor Jimmy on his birthday. But first some background….. from AllMusic

Jimmy Smith wasn’t the first organ player in jazz, but no one had a greater influence with the instrument than he did;Smith coaxed a rich, grooving tone from the Hammond B-3, and his sound and style made him a top instrumentalist in the 1950s and ’60s, while a number of rock and R&B keyboardists would learn valuable lessons from Smith’s example.

James Oscar Smith was born in Norristown, Pennsylvania on December 8, 1928 (some sources cite his birth year as 1925). Smith’s father was a musician and entertainer, and young Jimmy joined his song-and-dance act when he was six years old. By the time he was 12, Smith was an accomplished stride piano player who won local talent contests, but when his father began having problems with his knee and gave up performing to work as a plasterer, Jimmy quit school after eighth grade and began working odd jobs to help support the family. At 15, Smith joined the Navy, and when he returned home, he attended music school on the GI Bill, studying at the Hamilton School of Music and the Ornstein School, both based in Philadelphia. Continue Reading for complete biography

and from Wikipedia:

While the electric organ had been used in jazz by Fats Waller, Count Basie, Wild Bill Davis and others, Smith’s virtuoso improvisationtechnique on the Hammond helped to popularize the electric organ as a jazz and blues instrument. The B3 and companion Leslie speaker produce a distinctive sound, including percussive “clicks” with each key stroke. Smith’s style on fast tempo pieces combined bluesy “licks” with bebop-based single note runs. For ballads, he played walking bass lines on the bass pedals. For uptempo tunes, he would play the bass line on the lower manual and use the pedals for emphasis on the attack of certain notes, which helped to emulate the attack and sound of a string bass.

Smith influenced a constellation of jazz organists, including Jimmy McGriff, Brother Jack McDuff, Richard “Groove” Holmes, Joey DeFrancesco and Larry Goldings, as well as rock keyboardists such as Jon Lord, Brian Auger and Keith Emerson. More recently, Smith influenced bands such as the Beastie Boys, who sampled the bassline from “Root Down (and Get It)” from Root Down—and saluted Smith in the lyrics—for their own hit “Root Down,” Medeski, Martin & Wood, and the Hayden-Eckert Ensemble. Often called the father ofacid jazz, Smith lived to see that movement come to reflect Smith’s organ style. In the 1990s, Smith went to Nashville, taking a break from his ongoing gigs at his Sacramento restaurant which he owned and, in Music City, Nashville, he produced, with the help of a webmaster, Dot Com Blues, his last Verve album. In 1999, Smith guested on two tracks of a live album, Incredible!, the hit from the 1960s, with his protégé, Joey DeFrancesco, a then 28-year-old organist. Smith and DeFrancesco’s collaborative album Legacy was released in 2005 shortly after Smith’s death. Read More

and now the sad part of the story…..

….. In 2004, Smith was honored as a Jazz Master by the National Endowment for the Arts; that same year, Smith relocated from Los Angeles to Scottsdale, Arizona. Several months after settling in Scottsdale, Smith’s wife succumbed to cancer, and while he continued to perform and record, Jimmy Smith was found dead in his home less than a year later, on February 8, 2005. His final album, Legacy, was released several months after his passing.

As I look down Jimmy’s vast discography at AllMusic among my favorites is his 1991 release Fourmost, a reunion album with his 30 plus-year associates tenor saxophonist Stanley Turrentine and guitarist Kenny Burrell along with drummer Grady Tate.

So let’s say Happy Birthday and Thanks to Jimmy Smith with a 1993 performance of “Organ Grinders Swing” with Jimmy Smith playing with mates; Kenny Burrell on guitar; Grady Tate on drums and Herman Riley playing the part of Stanley Turrentine on tenor sax!

(Twin Sons of Different Mothers and times?)

(tangentially speaking – about the headline the Yo – is usually followed by Adrian ….. here (ADD strikes again)

Checking out the Roots Music Reports Jazz Chart this afternoon, I saw a name that interested me at number 12, right after the Duduka Da Fonseca Trio, was Roberto Fonseca and his latest album Yo. So the question before the house was who is this Roberto Fonseca and what does he play!! I download the album from Spotify and only got to listen to it on the way home. Now that is not a good thing because the trip home from work only last about four minutes (note that is one of the reasons that I have worked at the same job for the last 34 years!!) Anyway, the brief listen to the opening track “80s” was really all I needed to hear to know that I wanted to hear more from this artist! After work I listened to most of the album and while portions of it are not really my taste, I did enjoy the album, and who knows in another few months with the way that my taste is evolving, it may be right up my alley!! Anyway here’s some information about Roberto…….

Roberto Fonseca (born 1975, Havana) is a Cuban jazz pianist. From an early age, Fonseca was surrounded by music: his father was a drummer, his mother, Mercedes Cortes Alfaro, a professional singer (she sings on her son’s most recent solo album, Zamazu), and his two older half-brothers, Emilio Valdés (drums) and Jesús “Chuchito” Valdés Jr. (piano) are also two young musicians of great international prestige. After an early interest in drums, Fonseca switched to piano at the age of 8, and by 14 was experimenting with fusing American jazz and traditional Cuban rhythms; he appeared at Havana’s Jazz Plaza Festival in 1991 when he was just 15. Fonseca studied at the Cuba’s prestigious Instituto Superior de Arte, where he obtained a master’s degree in composition, even though he often says that he was a really bad student. After earning his degree, he left Cuba to find his sound…….Read More

And find his sound he did, and along the way he has been instrumental in the global renaissance of Cuban music. Roberto’s music is known for fusing Latin jazz, urban music, and African rhythms with the sounds of his heritage. His first album was a collaborative effort teaming Roberto with Javier Zalba in Temperamento and released En el Cmienzo in 1999. A solo album Tiene Que Ver, followed in the same year, and in 2001 Elengo and No Limit were released, After their release, Roberto concentrated on touring with Buena Vista Social Club and Rubén González, along with producing records for Asa Festoon and the late Ibrahim Ferrer. Since 2007, he has released three more album Zamazu (2007) Akokan (2009) Live in Marciac (2010), and that brings us back to 2012’s Yo. Check out Roberto at AllMusic – here So let’s go “into the night: with “80s” from Roberto Fonseca………..While I have been writing this and eating supper the music of Eldar Djangirov (No 15 on the RMR Jazz Chart this week) has been playing in the background … this is a young piano player I need to find out more about… damn all together now “Too Much Music , Too Little Time!!”