Organ-trio jazz can be high-energy groove music, played at a steady thrum.
Listen to B-3 master Dr. Lonnie Smith, however, and you’ll hear a wide dynamic range. He’ll play at a volume that’s barely audible, for long stretches, and expects his musicians to do the same. He wants to hear and be heard, by everyone.
“I don’t like when you’re playing flat-out, gas-pedal-down all the time,” Smith said. “It doesn’t make me feel good. It never made me feel good. You can cook at a slow boil, but if it’s not in your head, you can’t groove at a slow boil.”
Smith performs with Big Chief Donald Harrison at the Springfield Jazz Festival on Saturday, Aug. 8. The one-day festival takes place at Court Square and features Latin-jazz septet Jesus Pagan and Conjunto Barrio; vocalist Deva Mahal (Taj Mahal’s daughter); the Jeff Holmes Quartet with Dawning Holmes; saxophonist Elan Trotman and others. Admission is free.
A self-taught singer and trumpet player, Smith took up the organ when a Buffalo, N.Y., music store owner agreed to give him a brand-new Hammond B-3, if he could haul it away. A year later, Smith was backing Motown artists. He hooked up with guitarist George Benson in 1966, then launched a solo career on Columbia and Blue Note Records.
Before the end of this year, Smith will release an album with Evolution, a sextet with two drummers, two horns and a guitarist. Saxophonist Joe Lovano and pianist Robert Glasper are featured guests. The album contains versions of songs Smith wrote years ago but never played.
Working with two percussionists, Smith said, helped him capture a sound that’s been in his head for decades. “Years ago, in the 1960s, I wanted to do an album with 40 drummers,” Smith said, “but they thought I was crazy, so we never did that. We never got to it.”
Because Smith likes to play quietly, however, the situation only works if both Evolution drummers — Johnathan Blake and Joe Dyson — know how to listen to each other.
“When you play a song with a certain beat, you want a certain feel,” Smith said. “You know that everybody doesn’t play the way you hear it all the time. They’re from another school, and they hear something else, so they try to play something as close to that as they can.”
The second drummer, Smith continued, has to “listen to what the other drummer is playing without destroying the feel. They’ve got to lay back and just keep the feeling going, without trying to play all over the soloist or over the other drummer.”
Early in his career, Smith learned how to play by backing artists like Big Maybelle, Etta James, Gladys Knight and Dionne Warwick. “They knew what they were doing,” he said. “I’m the one who had to get in there. … I knew that I had to hang in there and try to keep up and make it right as best as I could, because I had just started. I had been playing about a year when that happened.”
Smith learned quickly. He listened closely to the other players, out of necessity — he doesn’t read music. On his first Columbia sessions, for the 1967 album “Finger-Lickin’ Good,” he taught the other musicians what to play by humming to them. That practice carried over into “Think!,” his 1968 Blue Note debut.
“Every time Rudy Van Gelder hit that board to cut a song, I would play it differently,” Smith said. “Lee Morgan would say, ‘Hey man, you told us to play this.’ I’d keep changing. They’d have to put something down [on paper] so that they’d know what to play.”
With his career ramping up, Smith approached an upstate N.Y. conservatory (“Most musicians know this school,” he said) and asked to enroll. “They said, ‘What? You can come up here and teach. [Everyone’s] trying to play what you’re doing.’ All I wanted to do was to learn how to read. Playing is one thing, but I wanted to know what I’m playing. You can play, but you still don’t know.”
Now, when trying out new musicians, Smith knows immediately whether it’s going to work out. “You can listen to a cat and know with the first note,” he said. “The first few bars, you definitely have it. You say, ‘Uh-oh.'” He also values stamina. “Sometimes you try out a musician, and they play the first song, the second song: dynamite. But now you’ve got the whole night to play, the whole evening, the whole concert, and they give out. They were good in the beginning, but they tuckered out. They got lost. You say, ‘Oh, no, what’s happening?'”
And unlike other bands, you won’t see sheet music on stands at one of Dr. Smith’s performances: Feeling is everything. He won’t get down on his musicians for wrong notes; it shows that they’re human.
“I say, ‘C’mon, man, play like your feet hurt!'” Smith said. “You want the ‘OW!’ You want to feel that. Everyone has a story to tell, and I want to hear it. I tell all the students and the musicians that I know: You have to play life. You can’t go wrong.”
DR. LONNIE SMITH performs with Big Chief Donald Harrison at the Springfield Jazz Festival on Saturday, Aug. 8, beginning at 6:50 p.m. Admission is free. Information: springfieldjazzfest.com.
