Twelve years after Jimmy Smith’s death, Lucky Peterson pays tribute to the genius of the Hammond organ master.
“My father fed me the blues before I could walk. And I played the organ before I could talk.” Lucky Peterson, the bottle class of precocious, fell into it as a child. To this irreducible blues, of which he is today the guardian of the flame, he knew how to add a dose of well felt groove. There is no doubt that this is the right formula to honor Jimmy Smith, a reference in soul jazz with whom he exchanged in his youth. In the end, this dive into history reminds us how much the hymns of the 1950s and 1960s remain of a terrible sensuality, to make the choir of a church dance…