This is the second half of one long Saturday. On August 4, 1956, Blue Note took Jimmy Smith's trio to the Club Baby Grand in Wilmington, Delaware, and taped four sets, one in the afternoon and three at night. Smith was on the Hammond organ, Thornel Schwartz on guitar and Donald Bailey on drums. Rudy Van Gelder ran the recording, and the local disc jockey Mitch Thomas, heard introducing the band on the first volume, was there too.
Smith had been with Blue Note only a few months. He came from Norristown, outside Philadelphia, had switched from piano to organ for good in 1954, and on stage he almost always worked in this shape: organ, guitar and drums. Leonard Feather, in the original notes, sets this record against the studio dates. Here you get the club.
Three of the four tracks come from the afternoon set, which the session listing puts first. Only "Get Happy" comes from the last set of the night, the tune just before the closing "Sweet Georgia Brown."
Side one opens with "Caravan." Feather describes a repeated organ riff, Latin touches from Bailey, and the melody passed to Schwartz before Smith builds to a long, free cadenza. "Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing" is played slow over a steady beat. Smith has the melody for the first half-chorus, Schwartz takes it from there, and it ends with an extra-long cadenza.
On side two, "Get Happy" is Harold Arlen's tune from 1929. Feather thought Schwartz's long solo here his best work on the record, and Bailey gets a run of breaks near the end. Cole Porter's "It's All Right with Me," from Can-Can, sits at a middle tempo and, for once, stops without a cadenza.
Smith remains the only one I've heard who can swing the generally clumsy-sounding organ.
Dom Cerulli, Down Beat, reprinted on The Jazz Tome
Cerulli gave this volume three stars, half a star less than the first volume, and felt it lacked that record's sustained excitement. The sleeve was designed by Reid Miles, with photography by Francis Wolff. Wikipedia gives both volumes as 1956 releases; the Jazz Discography Project has this one in 1957.
Most of what the trio played that night stayed on the tapes. By early 1957 Smith was back in Hackensack, and before long he was recording live again, at Smalls' Paradise in Harlem.
