Plays Pretty Just for You

Jimmy Smith had been on Blue Note for little more than a year, and the label had already filled a shelf with his organ. There were trio records from 1956 and a run of dates that February that went to A Date with Jimmy Smith and other LPs. This one was different. Leonard Feather, in the original notes, explains that instead of originals and jazz standards, Smith chose melodies the whole country had once known: pop songs, mostly from the 1930s.

The date was Wednesday, May 8, 1957, at Manhattan Towers in New York, with Alfred Lion producing and Rudy Van Gelder recording. It was the same day Horace Silver's quintet was at Van Gelder's in Hackensack. Eddie McFadden, who had joined the trio that January, played guitar, and Donald Bailey drums. Nine tunes were taped. Eight made the record; "Somebody Loves Me" stayed in the vault until a Japanese Blue Note release.

Side one opens with Hoagy Carmichael's "The Nearness of You," which Smith begins over a pedal point. Feather writes that he owned 29 versions of the song. "The Jitterbug Waltz" is Fats Waller's, from one of his last Victor sessions in 1942; Smith plays the first chorus with more light and shade than Waller did, then swings it in the second. "East of the Sun," at a medium-bright tempo, has McFadden soloing before Smith returns to the melody. On Vernon Duke's "Autumn in New York," Feather heard a grand opening.

Jimmy plays it with almost solemn majesty in the opening chorus;

Leonard Feather, original liner notes

Side two opens with "Penthouse Serenade," where Feather compares Smith's tremolos to Earl Hines. McFadden introduces Ray Noble's "The Very Thought of You." "I Can't Get Started," the song Bunny Berigan made a trumpet tune, has Smith on a single line in the middle of the keyboard. The record ends brightly with "Old Devil Moon," from Finian's Rainbow, with a Latin introduction.

Dom Cerulli, reviewing it in Down Beat, heard the change of mood right away:

This is a moodier Jimmy Smith than we have heard on record in recent releases.

Dom Cerulli, Down Beat, November 14, 1957, reprinted on The Jazz Tome

He gave it three and a half stars, and liked that Smith kept the slow tunes from turning into background music.

The sleeve was designed by Tom Hannan, with a photograph by Francis Wolff. Five of the tunes also went out on 45s, "East of the Sun" among them.

Feather saw the record as a door for new listeners, and closed with a welcome to the club. Six months later the trio was taped live at Smalls' Paradise in Harlem.