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Trudy Pitts

connoisseur series500
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connoisseur series500 Newbie

connoisseur series500

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I've only got two cds with her on it (that I'm aware of;) namely Legends of Acid Jazz w/Pat Martino and Martino's El Hombre.

This woman is special. I cannot compare her to any other B-3 player. I love the colors and texture (Conn borrowing from liner notes...) and the lack of preoccupation with high notes.

If there's anything else of her's out on cd format, I'm buying it! :wub:

Chalupa Newbie

Chalupa

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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."

  • 2 weeks later...
DMP Newbie

DMP

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Just picked up that "Acid Jazz" CD which has 2 (and maybe all?) of Trudy Pitts' "Prestige" albums, and, sorry to say, I'm a little disappointed. Not disappointed in Pitts, she's fine, maybe even more than that. It's the format of the albums - short tracks, average material - Pitts herself, in the new liners. seems to agree. (And Pat Martino, who gets co-billing on the package, is pretty much just a sideman, no solos - he's a wonderful musician, but this could be anyone.) Unlike some of the other organists who recorded for the label around this time, she's really under wraps here. So, my question: is there more representative stuff out there that shows what she might really be capable of? Anything where she stretches out? I know she's on a Roland Kirk record, but don't think she's much featured on that one.

Edited by DMP

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