Chang W. Lee/The New York Times
Music Review
The Hammond B-3 Lion Roars, Backed by His Pride
by Ben Ratliff
The organist Dr. Lonnie Smith played with his new big band for the first time on Tuesday night at Jazz Standard, and you know what they say about a big band on its first night: don’t go. Hear it after it’s settled a little, when its sound untangles, and the arrangements become refined. Give the soloists time to figure out what roles they will play, how to control themselves within the whole. Let a scene develop too: big bands sound best encircled by returning customers.
But after only two rehearsals, the 14-piece band, directed by the trombonist Corey King, sounded superfine. What I heard operated on two settings: nasty funk and wine-dark ballads. That was enough. The band runs from tuba to flute, with trumpets, trombones and saxophones in between; it sometimes merges three different low-end lines, from tuba, acoustic bass and Dr. Smith’s organ foot-pedals. It’s got an aggressive rhythm section, with the drummer Jamire Williams, the bassist Vicente Archer and the guitarist Jonathan Kreisberg, wielding cutting backbeats and shred guitar.
In original tunes like “Beehive” and “Play It Back,” a song Dr. Smith has been performing for at least 40 years — hear it on his 1970 record “Live at Club Mozambique” — the band cruised through James Brown-style rhythms and vamps, soloists working against a wriggling wall of sound. Crucially, the rhythm-section players followed Dr. Smith’s example by ducking and diving, changing up tone and rhythm, keeping the music bubbling through slow numbers and fast songs with not a lot of chord changes.
You might remember Dr. Smith visually because he wears a turban and has a long white beard. You might remember him aurally because he works with extreme dynamics. That’s what jazz organists tend to do, bossing your emotions with the Hammond B-3; at 68, he’s a lion of that tradition. But Dr. Smith, particularly, rolls around in the dynamic shifts, letting them define the music, making them as important as the notes and chords. On Tuesday, song after song, he dug a valley in the music and spread out, considering his way through it, playing jagged phrases conjoined with negative space, using hard prudence as he engaged the Doppler-tremolo effect of the rotating speaker in the Leslie speaker cabinet behind him.
Read the Full Review @ The New York Times
The Hammond B-3 Lion Roars, Backed by His Pride
by Ben Ratliff
The organist Dr. Lonnie Smith played with his new big band for the first time on Tuesday night at Jazz Standard, and you know what they say about a big band on its first night: don’t go. Hear it after it’s settled a little, when its sound untangles, and the arrangements become refined. Give the soloists time to figure out what roles they will play, how to control themselves within the whole. Let a scene develop too: big bands sound best encircled by returning customers.
But after only two rehearsals, the 14-piece band, directed by the trombonist Corey King, sounded superfine. What I heard operated on two settings: nasty funk and wine-dark ballads. That was enough. The band runs from tuba to flute, with trumpets, trombones and saxophones in between; it sometimes merges three different low-end lines, from tuba, acoustic bass and Dr. Smith’s organ foot-pedals. It’s got an aggressive rhythm section, with the drummer Jamire Williams, the bassist Vicente Archer and the guitarist Jonathan Kreisberg, wielding cutting backbeats and shred guitar.
In original tunes like “Beehive” and “Play It Back,” a song Dr. Smith has been performing for at least 40 years — hear it on his 1970 record “Live at Club Mozambique” — the band cruised through James Brown-style rhythms and vamps, soloists working against a wriggling wall of sound. Crucially, the rhythm-section players followed Dr. Smith’s example by ducking and diving, changing up tone and rhythm, keeping the music bubbling through slow numbers and fast songs with not a lot of chord changes.
You might remember Dr. Smith visually because he wears a turban and has a long white beard. You might remember him aurally because he works with extreme dynamics. That’s what jazz organists tend to do, bossing your emotions with the Hammond B-3; at 68, he’s a lion of that tradition. But Dr. Smith, particularly, rolls around in the dynamic shifts, letting them define the music, making them as important as the notes and chords. On Tuesday, song after song, he dug a valley in the music and spread out, considering his way through it, playing jagged phrases conjoined with negative space, using hard prudence as he engaged the Doppler-tremolo effect of the rotating speaker in the Leslie speaker cabinet behind him.
Read the Full Review @ The New York Times
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