Jimmy Smith - New Sound... A New Star: Jimmy Smith at the Organ, Vol. 1-3 (1997)

Collected here in a meaty two-disc set are Smith's first three Blue Note releases. Championed as "the world's greatest jazz organist", Smith burst upon the scene in the mid-'50s with a trail-blazing rhythmic and harmonic approach to the Hammond organ that defined the use of the instrument in jazz combos for the rest of the century. For those unfamiliar with Smith, this set is a perfect place to start. With less of an emphasis of low-key blues numbers than subsequent albums, the work here is informed by the energy and harmonic sophistication of bebop, and Smith is incandescent throughout.
Innovative, frantically paced attacks on standards like "The Way You Look Tonight" and "But Not For Me" are interspersed with sensitively painted mood pieces like "Tenderly" and "Willow Weep For Me", and treatments of compositions by other jazz greats (Monk, Lionel Hampton and Dizzy Gillespie). Thereare also a fair number of Smith originals, including the Latin-tinged starts and stops of "Judo Mambo", and "Fiddlin' The Minors", a mini-epic of blinding riffs.