The Hammond organ sound may be a commonplace part of today's musical landscape, but t'were not ever thus. At a distance of over half a century it is difficult to realise just how original Smith was and how colossal an impact he made when he first burst upon the scene. The unknown Pittsburgh ex-pianist was truly an instant sensation. Bop on the Hammond organ? A funky trio without a bass player? Fantastic! Every keyboard player wanted to sound like him and everybody else wanted to play with him, including such heavyweights as Art Blakey, Lee Morgan and Lou Donaldson, and Smith eagerly obliged. He had a head start on the competition, having rented a garage and stealthily woodshedded his hired Hammond in it for nearly a year. Soon he would be making lots more money with much larger and more lavishly produced albums, but this quartet was his bedrock sound and by far the best lineup he would ever find as a bandleader. The unhurried elegance of Kenny Burrell's guitar lines was the perfect foil for Smith's percussive, funkily frantic Hammond attack and the preachy tenor-sax of Stanley Turrentine – a gloriously blue sound copied by so many others yet never quite equaled – called every number to order. Turrentine took particular care about how he entered and finished a solo, and repeated listening to his leisurely yet bop-informed contributions to such tracks as ‘Back at the Chicken Shack’ and ‘When I Grow Too Old To Dream’ are note-perfect in their architecture and blues-drenched logic. Burrell too produced some of his very best work on these sessions, notably on ‘The Jumping Blues’, and Bailey never received proper credit for the subtle and personal beat-patterns he created, particularly on the title track of ‘Chicken Shack’. If you don't own any Jimmy Smith albums and are thinking of sampling a couple, this is definitely the choice to make. Time has mellowed these two former Blue Note vinyl albums but they still sound soulfully superb.