(b Norristown, PA, 8 Dec 1925). American jazz organist. He first learnt the piano, largely from his parents and through self-instruction, although in Philadelphia he attended the Hamilton School of Music (1948), where he studied the double bass, and the Ornstein School of Music (194950). He took up the Hammond organ in 1953, and acquired a formidable reputation in the Philadelphia area before making his extremely successful dιbut in New York at the Cafι Bohemia in 1956. An appearance at Birdland and a highly acclaimed performance at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1957 launched his international career as the first important jazz player on his instrument. Although the organ had been played previously in jazz (for example, by Fats Waller and Count Basie), it was usually treated as a novelty instrument. Smith spent the next 20 years touring, visiting Israel in 1974 and Europe in 1975. He then settled in Los Angeles, where, with his wife Lola, he opened his own club, Jimmy Smiths Jazz Supper Club. He resumed touring in the early 1980s.
Smith was the first player to make the organ effectively serve as a group (minus drums), providing walking bass lines with his feet, chordal accompaniment in his left hand and a solo line in his right, as may be heard on Walk on the Wildside, from the album The Unpredictable Jimmy Smith: Bashin (1962, Verve). His powerful style, which combined rhythm-and-blues elements with the more sophisticated bop vocabulary, has influenced virtually every subsequent jazz organist.
J. Cooke: The Electric Organ in Jazz: Jimmy Smith and some Others, Jazz Monthly, vii/11 (19612), 1113
B. Gardner: Jimmy Smith: Reaching the People, Down Beat, xxix/14 (1962), 1617
H. Siders: Jimmy Smith: a New Deal for the Boss, Down Beat, xxxvii/20 (1970), 1415
L. Birnbaum: Jimmy Smith: Sermonizing in the 70s, Down Beat, xliv/21 (1977), 223, 57
B. Doerschuk: Jimmy Smith, Contemporary Keyboard, iv/8 (1978), 2632, 356
G. Giddins: Return of the Organ Grinder, Rhythm-a-ning: Jazz Tradition and Innovation in the 80s (New York and Oxford, 1985), 1668
BILL DOBBINS/R