Put a frame around the image of Dr. Lonnie Smith, and you might think he was captaining a version of the Starship Enterprise. At his trio’s performance at Alverno College’s Wehr Hall Thursday night, he sat center stage, directly facing the near-capacity audience, as if gazing out toward far off galaxies. The wood cabinet in front of him could have been a roll-top desk or the back of a spaceship’s control panel, and the figure that rose above it—smiling and turbaned with a foot-long ripple of gray beard—seemed equal parts commander, holy man and Santa Claus.
The “control panel,” of course, was Smith’s Hammond B-3 Organ, an instrument with a storied jazz legacy, even if it isn’t heard too often these days. If Smith and his trio (guitarist Jonathan Kreisberg and drummer Johnathan Blake) didn’t exactly go where no jazzman has gone before, they covered considerable musical territory.
Just how much ground did Smith cover? His charming, jubilant demeanor and love of nonsense-syllable scat-singing reminded me of classical jazz master’s like Fats Waller or Louis Armstrong. (His scat-singing likely dates back to his early gigs with the guitarist George Benson, who became famous for scatting to his solos in mid-70s—Who picked it up from whom?) His sense of melody and phrasing—using the organ’s ability to bend and slide and blues-up a melody—well, that reminded me of great Duke Ellington sideman like Johnny Hodges or Cootie Williams. His organ solos could be soulfully economical like Count Basie, or to-the-brim, ‘70s-jazz-rock expansive like the Mahavishnu Orchestra—with Kreisberg and Blake ably stepping in to the John McLaughlin and Billy Cobham roles. At different times during the 100-minute set, Smith exploded with avant-garde, forearm-on-the-keyboard tone clusters, or ended a song or chorus with a good old-fashioned “amen” cadence.
But if I were to pick out “the real” Dr. Lonnie Smith from this concert, it would be the one he showed playing Slide Hampton’s “Frame for the Blues,” a song originally written for blowhard trumpet player Maynard Ferguson’s big band. Smith’s version, by contrast, was slow, sweet and soulful. He milked the organ’s tremolo sound for maximum effect (you could see a pair of Leslie speakers twirling in the background) with rich hall-filling chorales or with bluesy lines that ended on a single note the lingered and lingered and faded. In one magical passage, he brought the volume down to a whisper, so you could barely hear the musical tones above the soft click-clack of the organ keystrokes.
However you frame him, the blues—its joy and its ache—is at the heart of Smith’s music. But this concert showed just how much fun it is to spin variation after variation on that soulful theme.
