Bobby Timmons - This Here Is Bobby Timmons - Easy Does It (2012)

Twofer: Tracks #1-9 from the 12" album “This Here Is Bobby Timmons” (Riverside RLP-1164); Tracks #10-17 from the 12" album “Easy Does It – Bobby Timmons Trio” (Riverside RLP-9363). Bonus track #18, taken from the album “Pianists Galore!” (Jazz West Coast JWC-506).

Bobby Timmons was one of the leading exponents of the funky school of jazz piano, who also contributed heavily to the so-called “soul” movement with his three hit compositions: Moanin’, This Here, and Dat Dere, all part of his first album, “This Here Is Bobby Timmons.” But he was much more than that.

As this and his second album, “Easy Does It,” show, he was an imaginative, creative bop pianist with a richly varied repertoire. Both albums are models of unaffected, driving trio jazz in which the pianist, a catalytic, combustible player in any situation, makes full, two-handed use of the keyboard without ever resorting to pianistic tricks to make an easy point. Developing his solos with logic, consummate taste and an implacable sense of time, with Sam Jones and Jimmy Cobb providing sterling rhythm support, he showed he was an extremely capable, many-faceted performer as well as the groove-funk-soul purveyor of lazy cliché.