Sunday 4 April 2010

Johnny "Hammond" Smith ''Nasty!''

Johnny "Hammond" Smith

''Nasty!''
( LP Prestige Records, 1968 )
Catalog # PR 7588


Tracklisting:
If I Were A Bell
Song For My Father
Speak Low
Unchained Melody
Nasty!
Four Bowls Of Soup

Personnel & Notes:
Houston Person (ts)
Johnny "Hammond" Smith (org)
John Abercrombie (g)
Grady Tate (d)
Recorded in NYC, June 18, 1968
** Also part of Prestige PRCD 24244-2

Review:
On this quartet session, Johnny "Hammond" Smith was accompanied by a young John Abercrombie on guitar, Grady Tate on drums, and Prestige mainstay Houston Person on tenor sax. With the exception of "Unchained Melody," the musicians gave the tunes space, with all of the other five tracks clocking in at about seven to nine minutes. Yeah, in a sense it's run-of-the-mill as far as Prestige late-'60s soul-jazz goes: quite fine grooves, a dependable yet somewhat predictable house sound, and a reliance upon cover versions for much of the material (two-thirds of the songs, in this case). It's solidly executed, though, in a lean fashion that, to its credit, runs counter to the more excessive arrangements that were creeping into soul-jazz around this time. Smith hits a comely slow-burn groove on his version of Horace Silver's classic "Song for My Father," does a surprisingly swaggering and infectious job with the overdone "Unchained Melody," and gets down into his funkiest and bluesiest mode on the title cut, a nine-minute original composition. In 2000, this and a March 1967 session, Ebb Tide, were combined onto one compact disc titled The Soulful Blues.
By Richie Unterberger
(AMG. Copyright © 2010 All Media Guide, LLC. Content provided by All Music Guide ®, a trademark of All Media Guide, LLC. All rights reserved.)

By Pier

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

pw:

myfavouritesound

Bob said...

nice, thanks !

Ian G said...

Nice 'n Nasty! Another sublime set, cheers Pier!

cheeba said...

Very nice Pier! A Johnny Hammond I do not have and with Grady on drums - love it!

PS: my captcha was "joyes" and it is appropriate since MSF has brought many "joyes" my way!

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