Hammond's Soul-Deep Groove in 1969
A funky, soulful organist cutting loose with one foot in church and the other in the streets.
Black Feeling! captures Johnny Hammond Smith at a moment when soul-jazz organists were learning to dig deeper into R&B and funk without abandoning swing. Recorded for Prestige in 1969, the album finds him steering away from the straight-ahead postbop organ trio format toward something grittier and more blues-rooted. The organ-and-drums core gives way to fuller arrangements, horn sections cutting sharp lines, and a general loosening of tempo that lets Hammond explore the instrument's soul-shouting capabilities.
What distinguishes this from earlier organ dates is Hammond's willingness to get rougher with the instrument — less concerned with clean articulation, more interested in drawbar grit and percussion effects. The sessions reflect the moment: late-sixties soul-jazz was fracturing into competing camps, and Prestige was keen to position its stable of organists as players who could handle the new idiom. Hammond obliges, playing funkier, angrier, less concerned with proving his bebop credentials.
This is not Hammond at his most refined or his most swinging. It's a working organist doing what the moment demanded, and doing it without pretense. For listeners already invested in his earlier, cleaner work, it might register as a turn toward commercial compromise. For those who came to organists through Jimmy Smith's harder funk records, Black Feeling! offers access to Hammond's own version of the same impulse — a solid, energetic read on an evolving form.
