Jimmy Smith - The Sermon / RVG edition

1999 European CD reissue.

'The Sermon' is drawn from two separate sessions recorded on 25 August 1957 and 25 February 1958, respectively. Like Jimmy Smith's previous album, House Party, released in 1958, The Sermon! was engineered and recorded by optometrist-turned-studio boffin Rudy Van Gelder, who supervised most of Blue Note’s studio endeavours – though, in an unusual move, the album wasn’t recorded at Van Gelder’s own studio, which at this time was the front room in his parents’ home in New Jersey. Rather, both sessions were cut at The Manhattan Towers Hotel Ballroom, a venue that Van Gelder sometimes used when he had a larger band to record, or when its location was more convenient for the musicians involved.

Six decades since The Sermon! was first released, it remains a go-to album in Jimmy Smith’s canon. Though it lacks the flamboyant, show-stopping organ pyrotechnics that characterised some of the Hammond maestro’s earlier work, the album demonstrates that James Oscar Smith was much more than a charismatic soloist – here he proved he was a sensitive musician who served the music rather than his own ego. With its palpable gospel-inflections, The Sermon! also helped to sow the seeds for a more accessible, R&B-oriented mode of bebop called soul jazz. It remains one of the undoubted jewels in both Smith’s and Blue Note’s crowns.