Jimmy Smith's Greatest Hits

"File under JAZZ: Soloist Led Groups (Modern)" advises a note on the top right hand corner of the back of the sleeve. My record collection is modest enough that such elaborate categorisation is unnecessary, so I'm content to file my two LPs by Smith, ('The Incredible') Jimmy between Sinatra, Nancy and Smithereens, The. The two albums are a mismatched pair of compilations on the Verve label: this Greatest Hits and a Best Of, Vol. 2.

I tend not to think of jazz artists in terms of 'hits' but there were numerous singles and EPs of Smith's tunes, some of which must have sold well enough. The recordings included here all date between '62 and '66. On most of them Smith is accompanied by a big band using arrangements by the likes of Oliver Nelson and Lalo Schifrin. There's only a single trio performance, that of 'The Organ Gringer's Swing' where Smith is ably assisted Kenny Burrell on guitar and Grady Tate on drums.

Alun Morgan's sleevnotes mention that Smith's material while at Verve extended to "television show themes, Christmas carols, current popular tunes, earthy blues numbers and contemporary jazz themes." On this record most of the tracks are movie-related in one way or another, with treatments of the themes from Goldfinger and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf among them. On one of the "earthy blues numbers," a rendition of 'Hoochie Coochie Man', Smith contributes some appropriately rough-edged vocals in addition to working his usual magic on the Hammond B3.

Comments

All Wrapped Up

Here's another of the compilation cassettes I bought this summer, having taken home a Denon twin-deck hi-fi cassette player from the local charity shop. All Wrapped Up is a 1983 compilation of singles by The Undertones, with Side One filled with A-sides, and B-sides on Side Two. A cassette must be the least desirable medium for such an arrangement, with a long rewind required if one just wants to hear the hits repeatedly. The Undertones were unapologetically provincial and anti-fashionable, with their songs sharply-written slices of life that pointedly avoided any mention of politics, or of the then-continuing violence in their native Derry. My favourite tracks are the obvious choices: 'Teenage Kicks', 'Jimmy Jimmy', 'Here Comes the Summer', 'My Perfect Cousin' & 'Wednesday Week'. Their later singles showed increased sophistication but lack the some of the straightforward charm of their earlier work. The B-sides, not unexpectedly, are mo...

Complete String Quartets

While the string quartets of Nikolai Yakovievich Myaskovsky (1881-1950) were all published in the Soviet era, a few of them had pre-revolutionary origins. Two quartets he wrote in 1911 and '09 while a conservatory student re-surfaced some twenty years later designated as Quartets Nos. 3 and 4. An even earlier "schoolboy" piece was later re-worked more radically as Quartet No. 10, premiered in 1945. Myaskovsky partook of an ample share of the turmoil and tragedy of his times: he was wounded and shell-shocked after service on the front line in World War I, and his father, who had been a high-ranking military engineer, was brutally murdered by a revolutionary mob. Despite that, his music, even at its most sombre, hasn't the black bile or biting sarcasm of Shostakovich's, or of his friend Prokofiev's. Of the works collected here, in excellent early '80s performances by the Taneyev Quartet, only Quartet No. 1 has any significantly metallic tang of early S...

Onslow

George Onslow was an odd-man-out among 19th-century French composers. Born into wealth and privilege, the grandson of an English Earl, he had no need to follow the operatic gravy train, with string quartets (of which he wrote 36) and string quintets (there are another 32 of those) forming the bulk of his compositional output. The present disc contains his 28th, 29th and 30th quartets, in compelling performances by the Quatuor Diotima. These quartets were written toward the end of a prolifically-creative period for Onslow in the years 1829-35. Viviane Niaux, in her informative booklet notes, ascribes this to the composer's having heard performances of two of Beethoven's late quartets for the first time in 1828, at their Paris première. Like many of his contemporaries, Onslow was at once "fascinated and disconcerted", and, although he considered them "extravagant", they seem to have been powerfully inspirational. A further spur to creativity may have been his ...

This is a Recording

Search This Blog