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PICTURE PAGE 2


Tony at Jazz Bones in Tacoma, Wa. Photos by Mike Carlson and Kathy, I used Scott "Organ Freak" Hawthorne's C3 and 31H

Cartoonist Bruce Blitz (L) and Drummer Marty Rosefeld (R) at Cape May Bruceblitz.com

JAZZ KITCHEN INDY



SOME PICS FROM JIMMY SMITH'S FUNERAL
I hope you understand that these photos were forwarded to me by
Jimmy's close friend Mr. C (Trudy Pitts' Husband) to share with you.
These Photos are just here to share one of the saddest days of my life!!!!!
These photos are not meant for publicity in anyway!
PLEASE RESPECT AND KEEP THEM FOR YOURSELF.
I have not yet even considered doing a Jimmy Smith Tribute concert.
There was only one James Oscar Smith :(
It brought great comfort to have some of the greatest organ players there at the funeral
as we all celebrated and grieved together!!!!!!!!! There were a lot of organist world wide
who could not attend and were sorely missed.

The Organ Players (Left))missing that I can remember is Mike Torsone, Celeno Clark and Keith Hannraty
Pappa John DeFrancesco (Right) delivering Joey's Words
Joey was supposed to open the previous night with Jimmy at Yoshi's for their new Legacy Tour.
Pappa John struggled to get through the words & tears as we all felt the great loss!!!!!
Joey deeply regreted not being able to attend as he played Yoshis in Oakland. Ca.
Jimmy's organ was on stage at Yoshi's with light on it.
I choked up when Joey told me he was just waiting for Jimmy to come turn it on and play.



ALL OF THE ABOVE PICS ARE OF TONY AND JAMES OSCAR SMITH JUNIOR AT THE CLEF CLUB!
Meeting and playing with Jim helped make me feel better. A NEW RELATIONSHIP!
It was also great meeting Jimmy's family, seeing Michael Ward again,
Lola's son , Along with meeting Tommy Campbell, Jimmy's nephew and great drummer!

Keith Hannraty (L) * Gene Ludwig (R)

Gene Ludwig, Trudy Pitts and Me (L) at the clef club. Jim, David Wolf and Me (R)

A CHANCE TO MEET SOME OF THE SMITH FAMILY. They were gracious and wonderful!!!!!!!!

Joey D and Jimmy playing together with Byron Landham and Paul Bollenback at the 2005 IAJE Conference .
This was the last time I heard Jimmy play Live!
Joey let Jimmy rip it up and I still can hear Jimmys Rap in my head now!!!!!
Thanks Joey For bringing up Jimmy, you made the night happen.
M. Florio, Joey's manager was also there to make sure everything was alright.
He was very cool ! Nice to finally meet you Mike :)

Jimmy receiving the NEA award by Nancy Wilson at IAJE, Long Beach , Calif

JIMMY SMITH (JAMES OSCAR SMITH) WAS THE GREATEST JAZZ ORGANIST OF ALL TIMES! I WILL MISS YOU FOREVER.
My meetings with Jimmy in person were few and brief. I was acquainted to his music at 12 yrs old and I totally immersed myself into his music. Being a first generation Italian/American who's parent's immigrated post WWII, my parents did not complete school due to the war . They were both only Childs, so our family was small and resources for information were limited when it came to jazz organ especially. I only could find organ records at the local small mall record store. And of course, I always looked first to see if there was some other or new Jimmy Smith record that I didn't have in the bin. Jimmy was not only my first jazz organ experience but rather my first influence to jazz . For my first few formative jazz years , I practiced imitating Jimmy 's tunes on a regular accordion with out having a teacher at all who understood the music. So I just copied everything I heard the best I could to try and recreate his sound. When I was 13 my Dad bought me my first of 2 Cordovoxes (Cordovox was an electronic accordion that had a Lowery type organ built in to the accordion. The squeeze box connected to the organ tone generator via a thick cable that carried the electronics. I was so obsessed with the organ that I barely used the bellows of the Cordovox to get real accordion sounds, rather I kept it strapped shut and played left hand bass on the buttons and right hand flute stops with percussion or with using Full organ, and as many other sounds as I could create through a 145 Leslie and preamp trying to sound like Jimmy Smith. It was from that set up that I recorded some cassette tapes of me playing "The Preacher" , SERMON, Blue Moon etc....on this cordovox to Jimmy at MOJO Records, an address coped from the back of one of his own MOJO record releases. Next thing I know is he called back coincidentally on my 16th Birthday! See my relationship to Jimmy was through his records and his voice from those records. I was drenched into Jazz organ and to me Jimmy Smith and the B3 fascinated and consumed me as Jimmy was like a God. I would listen to his records over and over while I dazed at the record covers imagining this world that seemed to of had no boundaries. An endless fountain of creation that somehow touched my soul so powerfully as I was convinced I was going to be an organ player when I grow up! The only thing I could remember from that call other than the distinct breathy growl in his voice was him telling me "don't worry about playing all them notes, learn how to play the right cords", a lesson that has never stopped. I saw him the next summer in Chicago during a summer NAMM that I was fortunate to go! Jimmy was to judge an organ contest for theatre organist and it was coincidental to run into him in the hall before the event. He said he couldn't believe he was going to sit through all that theatre music BULL S_ _ T:) To me standing and talking with Jimmy was great and I couldn't believe it was him. See by the Mid 70's a lot of organ tours that were publicized ceased. I never got a chance to see him live as of yet. Finally the year later, Jimmy came through Columbus and I got a chance to see him live. I sat next to Lola as Jimmy played and I couldn't believe I was really watching him play in person. After the show he invited me and my Dad to his club. My Dad and I went soon after to visit Jimmy and Lola at "The Jimmy Smith Supper Club" in Woodland Hills , Ca. I sat not 6 feet from him while he played a set that totally blew my mind. After he finished he said to me , "come on up and play some organ". I couldn't beleive it! I had nothing to say musically after that but went to play anyway as he insisted. I couldn't tell you who was on drums or guitar. I was just on stage and getting ready to play the organ for Jimmy Smith! . Jimmy sat down where I sat next to Lola and my Dad and I got the courage somehow to start. I remember singing "Everything must change" to Lola and Jimmy and Lola were setting close to each other drinking Mimosas. After I played the bartender said to me that I sounded like I came from the East coast and he really dug my fire. Jimmy was great to me., very nice and genuine. Soon after that myparents bought what was to become Monaco's Palace Italian restaurant and I didn't see Jimmy again until a few years ago when he played at Nightown in Cleveland. After we opened the restaurant I met my first wife and had 3 children while I ran the restaurant business. At the beginning I played 5 nights a week in the lounge with my B3 but rarely got the chance to play much jazz. As liquor laws tightened the bar biz changed and playing was reduced to once or twice a week. Actually, in the Early eighties, organ wasn't that popular and if I started playing jazz, it would clear the room . I soon left the restaurant business and went to run my fathers construction biz . A business my father started after he came to America . For the first time in years I was free to take gigs outside the restaurant. I started to play organ again and the interest was returning. Another generation had passed and organ was making a comeback. I remember Jimmy coming out with Angel Eyes and a friend told me, hey Jimmy's got a new one out. Like a kid I went to the CD store to find it. Internet was just starting and I wasn't online yet! It was soon after that I heard of Joey DeFrancesco. Enough time had passed that somebody new was coming up on the organ. My love for Jimmy then was still so strong that I then started finding Jimmy's other recordings as I did get on the electronic highway. Groovin at Smalls paradise, and Live at the Club Baby Grand. I was getting turned on to a new side of Jimmy I never knew existed. I started getting discouraged with my career in music as I began to question whether I should even be trying to play the organ as my Nearalgic Amyotrophy returned. I was going through a divorce and had 3 young daughters, gigs were sparse and I started contemplating becoming a Deacon of the Catholic church. I thought maybe my mission was music in the church or maybe even no music at all. I was told that I was not a candidate at the time for deacon hood due to recently being divorced. Soon after, I found out that my father was terminally ill and I spent the next year helping him prepare our family for his departure. It was about 6 months later that I met Joey and my career started to take off and change. As I mentioned earlier, I went to see Jimmy at Nightown in Cleveland a few years ago. I hadn't seen him since the early 80s. He said he vaguely remembered me in a tired voice as he seemed to walk slow as he leaned forward. It didn't matter that he didn't remember me. It mattered that I got a chance to see him again. Michael Ward was there and said, I remember you, Jimmy had your tapes and pictures in his office at the supper club . I saw Jimmy the last time at IAJE 2005 as Jimmy received the NEA award, I also shook his hands in the hall way after he was part of the NEA panel discussions about each NEA Nominee. Jimmy told a funny story about carrying the organ in a hurst. Being pulled over while Thornel was sleeping in the back. and rose up when they stopped scaring the police. It was amazing to hear stories from the invincible my IDOL. Of course my perspectives have changed a lot since my first Jimmy Smith record. I can't say that I had a lot of time spent with the master. I would suppose that every organ player alive attempted to get to know Jimmy or at least wanted to. Jimmy Smith and I however and will continue to have a close relationship as I still have plenty to learn from the great master of the B3 from the endless gifts of music that he recorded and has left behind. I think you can tell how much of a relationship I had with him and how much he influenced me: like so many other great organists, It comes out in our playing. Jimmy's influence is in all of us jazz organist one way or another. Lets face it, he set the standards!


Jazz pioneer Smith gets musical tribute

By Daniel Rubin

Philadelphia Inquirer Staff Writer Posted on Fri, Feb. 18, 2005

On the day they buried Jimmy Smith, no one rushed to sit at the Hammond B3 organ that he'd made famous.
The Philadelphia Clef Club was filling with old friends and fans about 4 p.m. yesterday for a jam session to honor the jazz great. Kids in hoods with horns, old men and their sticks - everyone stood waiting.
Then Tony Monaco stepped up. He'd been crying on the sidewalk as he waited for the door to open. After canceling his regular gig at a club in Columbus, Ohio, Monaco flew here to honor the man whose records had changed his life at age 12.
Monaco, 45, handed off his coat, fiddled with the floor pedals, then filled the hall with "I'll Close My Eyes," a song Smith owned.
As the applause faded, he said softly, "I just wanted to make sure the organ worked before everyone started," and disappeared into the crowd.
Three times yesterday the legendary player from Norristown was honored - at a funeral service at Deliverance Evangelistic Church at 20th and Lehigh, at the Clef Club, and at Yoshi's, in Oakland, Calif., where two massive Hammond B3s face each other on the stage.
One was to have been played last night by his protege, Joey DeFrancesco, who grew up in Delaware County. The other was to remain silent, its lid closed, its light left on. That was to have been Smith's, who died Feb. 8 at age 76.
The two had been scheduled to start a string of shows together this week in support of their album Legacy, released Tuesday.
At the noon service, DeFrancesco's father, John, read a note from his son, saying how he felt obliged to continue with the show.
"That's what Jimmy would have wanted him to do," the elder DeFrancesco said. "Keep the cats working."
As evening approached, the cats kept coming to the Clef Club. Following Monaco was Keith Hanratty, a 51-year-old lawyer from Minneapolis, who had flown in for the event as well.
He was 16 when his keyboard teacher invited Smith to hear the teenager play. "He came by one more time then invited me out to study with him in L.A.," Hanratty said. "He had this club where his mother cooked in the back.
"I'd play and he'd growl, 'Here's how you do it,' and he'd show me. I was always asking questions. He'd say, 'Shut up. You'll learn something.' I learned to listen."
Said Rich Budesa of Camden, the third to sit at the organ: "He was a giant man. He was the biggest genius that ever touched the Hammond. Jazz organ is Philadelphia's music - that whole style is our music - and he was the best at it, the originator."
Smith did not discover the jazz organ. In 1951, he heard Wild Bill Davis playing it in Atlantic City, and Smith, who'd been winning audiences at the piano since age 8, asked how long it took learn the instrument.
"Four years," Davis told the young man (in some versions of the story, it was 15 years). Smith hung a chart of the organ's foot pedals on the wall of the warehouse where he worked. Within three months, he played a fluid, walking bass line with his feet.
By 1956, he was recording for Blue Note. Smith made a name for himself mastering an instrument so foreign to jazz that it was several years before Downbeat Magazine created an award category for organ.
But it was the private Jimmy Smith who was remembered yesterday at the church service: the uncle so beloved that when he visited, his Norristown family shucked corn and picked string beans for him. The man they knew as Sonny, Smitty, Big Jimmy and Boo.
At the funeral, four musical friends were each given two minutes to send a final message.
Bill "Mr. C" Carney called Smith the "Charlie Parker of his instrument."
Carney's wife, Trudy Pitts, apologized to the pastor, saying words could never express what was inside her. And so after a few remarks, she walked up to the church organ and silenced the room with a 10-minute performance of "Amazing Grace" and "I'll Be Seeing You" that raised shouts of "Amen" as arms extended toward the church's ceiling.
"Hey," she said afterward, as family and friends clapped. "Two minutes for Jimmy Smith? Don't mean a thing to me. I had to let my spirit fly."


Hammond B-3 Legend Jimmy Smith Passes
Posted: 2005-02-10


December 8, 1925 to February 8, 2005
Jimmy Smith, the Hammond B-3 icon who creatively revolutionized the instrument in Jazz, died of apparent natural causes on Tuesday, February 8, at his home in Scottsdale, Arizona. Funeral arrangements are pending.

“Jimmy was one of the greatest and most innovative musicians of our time. I love the man and I love the music. He was my idol, my mentor and my friend,” fellow Hammond B-3 artist and friend, Joey Defrancesco said yesterday.

Born in Norristown, Pennsylvania on December 8, 1925, Jimmy Smith ruled the Hammond B-3 organ in the 1950s & 1960s. He turned the instrument into almost an ensemble itself, fusing R&B, blues, and gospel influences with bebop references into a jubilant, attractive sound that many others immediately absorbed before following in his footsteps. Smith initially learned piano both from his parents and on his own. After service in the Navy, in 1948 he studied bass at the Hamilton School of Music and piano at Ornstein¹s School of Music in Philadelphia. He began playing the Hammond organ in 1951, and soon earned a great reputation that followed him to New York, where he debuted at the Café Bohemia. A date at Birdland and then a 1957 Newport Jazz Festival appearance launched Smith¹s career. He toured extensively throughout the 1960s & '70s.

Smith's Blue Note sessions from 1956 to 1963 were extremely influential and are highly recommended. They included collaborations with Kenny Burrell, Lee Morgan, Lou Donaldson, Tina Brooks, Jackie McLean, Ike Quebec, and Stanley Turrentine, among others. Smith also recorded for Verve from 1963 to 1972, many of them featuring big bands and using fine arrangements from Oliver Nelson. These included the excellent Walk on the Wild Side.

Jimmy Smith persevered in times when the Hammond organ seemed like it was down and out, and reigned as the master of the craft. The authentic sound of the Hammond still lives on in his protégé and good buddy Joey DeFrancesco. The pair recently recorded a studio album together, Legacy, to be released on Concord Records February 15. A national tour was in place for the B-3 soul mates to commence at Yoshi's February 16-20, along with a special Iridium engagement in New York, March 23-27.



KEYBOARD MAGAZINE 30th Anniversary Party during NAMM 2005 in Anneheim, CA. It was a great honor
BTW, They Gave Joey the B3 Boss award that night, It was a spectacular party!!!!!!

LATE GREAT DON LESLIE AND HIS OPUS ONE at Don's Home

Pete, Me, Dr. Lonnie and Joey hangin on Jimmy Smiths favorite organ at Pete's House* Dr. Lonnie, Pete and I in my studio

Joey, Frankie Valli and Me at Namm * Me, Joey and My Brother Marino at 2005 Namm

Click Pictures Above to Hear Tony and Chester Thompson Jamb together during 2004 NAMM show



A PHOTO OP in the studio for Cakewalk Software (L) * 2 of my best friends Pete and Darby (Pres of Summit Records) (R)


The Famous Green Dolphin Street in Chicago

Concert with Legend Jimmy McGriff in Columbus.

Concert with the great Dr. Lonnie Smith in Columbus

Me and Pete with the Late Great Hank Marr * My Wife Kathaleen with Joanne Fallico

Dinner at Moms playing the squeeze box * Nicole, Daniela and Christina (My Daughters)

CD #5 FIERY BLUES PARTY AT DARBY's House. It was also Linda's Birthday (Darby's wife)

Playing at the Rhythm Room in Phoenix. I played with Dowell Davis a great drummer!!!!!!!!

ZANZIBAR BLUE PHILLY

MY FIRAST GIG with Bruce Foreman and Daryl Green at the Famous Purple Onion, San Fransisco

Jay Valle with me at NAMM * Happy 45th 8/14/2004

Winter Wonderland at Columbus Sound * Wabit Season no Duck Season!

How about when this Kit (Baby Fox, grows up its gonna eat the duck!) I counted 7 babies , a Mother and a not so playful Father.
Right Down the Ravine from the Studio!

NEW YEARS EVE AT THE JAZZ FACTORY, LOUISVILLE, KY 2004/2005

Me and Mrs. Leslie at Jim Leslies House having dinner during NAMM. Shes Very HIP!

DEMOS FOR CAKEWALK at 2005 NAMM

MORE CAKEWALK DEMOS (L) * Rick Wakeman and ME (R) another one of my Idols!!!!!

DEMOS FOR HAMMOND AT 2005 NAMM

A FILM OP FOR NAMM TV* A miniature Leslie on a shelf at Don Leslie's House