Shirley Scott and the Women of the B-3
Featured Album
In 1955 or so, when Jimmy Smith was popularizing the Hammond B-3 electric organ in jazz, a Philadelphia bar owner who’d rented one coaxed Shirley Scott into giving it a try. They hit it off right away.
Scott played piano, so she knew the keyboard (the B-3 has two, and two octaves of bass pedals arranged like white and black keys), and she’d played trumpet in school, so she could think like a horn player, in terms of breath-like phrasing and tonal nuances The little “key click” when she pressed down a note gave her attack piano-percussive bite, but organs can also hold notes like a wind instrument. Three dozen drawbars deployed in combination control the timbre: pure as a sine wave, greasy as a cheese steak, gurgling like it’s underwater.
With those foot pedals, she could do without a bassist — making up, maybe, for the inconvenience of having to haul a 400-pound leviathan to gigs. That wasn’t always necessary. Soon B-3s were found in many inner-city clubs, the very symbol of populist jazz: great for playing the blues but with inevitable echoes of the church. The Hammond split the difference between Saturday night jubilation and Sunday morning devotion.
Organ has often been a platform for the kind of macho posturing common to players of electric instruments: remember Keith Emerson? And jazz women have seldom been encouraged to play loud aggressive axes. But since piano was regarded as acceptably feminine (think Lil Armstrong, Mary Lou Williams and Marian McPartland), and jazz organists tended to start as pianists, women snuck in the door.
Shirley Scott (1934-2002) got plenty of body from the instrument, exploiting the B-3′s capacity to play over and under (and on) true pitch to thicken a tone. But she had a light touch, rhythmically, and the buoyant momentum of a kid skipping down the street. She’d riff on across-the-beat triplets and syncopations to build suspense and complicate that momentum One more thing that kicked her music: pedals aside, in the studio she dug the plump, percussive sound of upright bass (George Duvivier, Wendell Marshall, Henry Grimes…), anticipating Medeski Martin & Wood by decades.
For her virtues, hear Scott’s first, marathon 1958 session as leader on Trio Classics Vol. 1. Her hornlike phrasing comes out on Miles’s “Four,” and she serves up gallons of classic B-3 razzle-dazzle and shuddery vibrato, swoops and swells and churchy amen endings. But on “It Could Happen to You,” “Goodbye” and other tunes, she seems to kid jazz-organ clichés even as they’re forming. Dyspeptic or euphoric blues licks bubble up over the beat; volume-pedaled crescendos abruptly erupt, as in old radio plays
She made it all hard-swinging fun. By then she was touring with bluesy, bruising, ballad-caressing tenor saxist Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis, as on his Cookbook Vol. 1, which kicks off with a bang, and ends with a rousing take on evergreen “Avalon.” In a supporting role, sometimes she’s quiet, oozing through stealthy background chords; sometimes her keys shout encouragement, booting Davis or flutist Jerome Richardson in league with drummer Arthur Edgehill, who played on her own recordings. (A good Scott discography is here.)
From Jaws ‘band she jumped to another blues-drenched tenor: in 1961 she began recording with (and married) Stanley Turrentine. Their hand-in-glove interplay is plain on Soul Shoutin’, from 1963, where she works the subterranean bass pedals on a few tracks, and keeps the phrases dancing even when laying down fat chords. In general the groove is a little more relaxed than with Lockjaw — not that they take it easy. “Yes Indeed” makes the organ group’s church associations explicit.
Back then, Scott also made some great big band sides for Impulse, arranged by Oliver Nelson. They’re not on site, alas, but Nelson plays sleek tenor on her Blue Seven, alongside another onetime boss, trumpeter Joe Newman. For a quick period survey, the pick is Queen of the Organ: Shirley Scott Memorial Album.
By the end of the 1960s, jazz organ groups were fading. Scott’s profile dipped till the ’90s, when she sometimes recorded on piano. But her high profile early on opened up possibilities for other B-3 women like New York’s Gloria Coleman.
Even so, in the late ’60s rock organ groups were coming in. One might see Scott’s Philadelphia contemporary Trudy Pitts as mediating between waxing and waning styles, on a volume in Prestige’s Legends of Acid Jazz series credited to her and emerging guitar star ,a href=”http://www.emusic.com/artist/Pat-Martino-MP3-Download/10562848″>Pat Martino: two 1967 quartet dates originally under Pitts ‘name. (Martino recorded his debut El Hombre, with Trudy on organ, between these sessions.) Alongside typical organ-group fare and odd-meter hiccups (“Take Five,” “Siete,” “Count Nine”) they do recent pop: the Tijuana Brass’s “Spanish Flea,” syncopated Bacharach (“What the World Needs Now”) and Beatles (“Eleanor Rigby”), and organ band Procol Harum’s “Whiter Shade of Pale.” Pitts gamely sings the last one (and “Rigby” and others), though she has no more clue than anyone else what the lyric’s about.
Later organists like Carla Bley and Germany’s Barbara Dennerlein updated the console concept; for a last look at the first wave of B-3 women, turn to France. New Jersey’s Rhoda Scott (no relation to Shirley) moved there in the late ’60s, becoming a fixture on the Parisian scene. Jazz in Paris: Rhoda Scott & Kenny Clarke is a very full-sounding duo recital with the original bebop drummer, a celebrated fellow expat. He doesn’t need to do much, given what a keys-and-pedals dynamo she is. Clarke sits back to keep time while Scott trots out all the surging chords, bluesy melodies and bass walks a superior B-3 jockey can muster.
