I really can’t remember the first time I heard Jimmy Smith, but it must have been after I moved to Berkeley and was working at the Tower Records there. My friend Felix may have mentioned him to me… Felix suggested a lot of jazz to me during my years at the Berkeley store. The first disc of Jimmy Smith’s I picked up was ‘The Sermon’ (which I’ll talk about whenever one of the girls grabs it), but I became fanatic about Jimmy Smith and would pick up a disc or two every pay check for a couple months. When Celia grabbed the two Jimmy Smith / Wes Montgomery albums I have, I was actually surprised how much Jimmy Smith is on my shelf. No complaints here though.

Wes Montgomery was introduced to me from a former roommate James. James ran a guitar shop in Berkeley, and I rented a room from him when I first moved to the Bay Area for about a year. James played lots of jazz guitar, quite a bit of the variety that I generally disliked (Pat Methany, John Scofield, etc.) but ‘Fried Pies’ by Wes Montgomery was the thing he would mostly play when showing off archtop guitars in his shop.

There are a few discs worth of material featuring these artists together, and the style of the tracks fall into one of two categories. There are a number of tracks that are smaller groups that both artists generally performed with. And these tracks are wonderful. They have the typical Jimmy Smith shuffle, and both players seem to branch out a bit. But a number of the tracks feature big band arrangements that just feel stiff and awkward. Unfortunately, these later tracks interspersed with the good ones… so I am starting to wonder. Should I just keep albums organized as albums? Or should I set up playlists that are also my ‘corrections’: in other words, the way these albums should have been put together in the first place.