Jimmy Smith's Kitchen Sessions in High Gear
Home Cookin' gives you Smith at his most commanding on the Hammond organ, solid throughout and genuinely worth your time.
Home Cookin' captures Jimmy Smith doing what he does best — commanding the Hammond organ with a player's confidence and appetite. These sessions, recorded across 1958 and 1959, land somewhere in the middle of his catalog, not a debut and not his final statement, but a place where he'd already figured out exactly how to make the instrument talk. The AllMusic reviewer Lindsay Planer heard it clearly: "The Hammond organ mastery of Jimmy Smith is arguably nowhere as profound as on this collection." That's not hyperbole — Smith really does sound like he owns the machine here.
What makes this album work is its refusal to pretend to be something it isn't. The Penguin Guide to Jazz called it formulaic, which stings a little, but then it qualified the complaint by noting the solid quality throughout and highlighting the presence of Kenny Burrell, whose guitar work gives the organ room to breathe instead of crowding it. The interplay between Smith's left-hand lines and Burrell's single-note soloing creates real conversation; you're not listening to a keyboard player showing off with a guitarist in the background. This is the kind of album that works best if you come to it without expectations of transcendence or innovation — come to it instead for what it actually delivers: reliable, swinging organ jazz played by people who knew their trade.
For someone starting out with Smith, this is a sensible entry point. It's not his most adventurous work, and it doesn't pretend to be. The album simply proves, track after track, that Smith had the chops and the taste to keep an album interesting without breaking the formula. That solid one status, as the Penguin Guide concluded, means it holds up.
Who's playing
Where next?
More by Jimmy Smith
All 13 albums →
The musicians on this record
Their own records, close in time
