This Cookbook Has All The Recipes

The organ-plus-tenor group of Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis & Shirley Scott

Someday the music world will catch up to the sly taciturn hipness of Shirley Scott.

The “Queen of the Jazz Organ” was born and raised in Philadelphia. She came along at a moment in the mid ‘50s when the city was a locus for some of the instrument’s now-legendary firebreathers; among the organists active in the area during the 1950s and ‘60s were Jimmy Smith, Charles Earland, Jimmy McGriff and Richard “Groove” Holmes.

From the very beginning of her recording career, Scott had her own thing going on, a style notable for its rhythmic exactitude and crisp, understated, instantly magnetic sense of swing. The first time Scott was extensively documented was 1958, after she joined the group of tenor saxophonist Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis for what became his “Cookbook” series of albums. These works, intermittently available via cursory and somewhat underwhelming reissues, have at last been properly anthologized: Craft Recordings’ 4-LP 4-CD Cookin’ with Jaws and the Queen arrived last week, in a package featuring tremendous session photographs and new liner notes from Willard Jenkins.

The set offers an excellent first encounter with Scott, who somehow remains underestimated despite releasing more than 50 records as a leader. Recorded over three strikingly productive daylong sessions for Prestige, these sides are foundational: They mark one origin point of the gut-level blues-based “soul jazz” that flourished in the ‘60s. They show how rapidly Davis’ group, one of the early organ-tenor small bands, defined the perimeters of blistering shout-chorus blues as well as dramatic jazz balladry a la Coleman Hawkins. And, not insignificantly, the Cookbook titles capture the moment when jazz could be groovy corner-bar hangout music and art music in the same instant.

Also: They reveal Scott as a stealth floor general, with a knack for almost invisibly shaping the proceedings. Some organ players of this era were almost authoritarian in the way they nudged soloists along, defining the peaks and valleys before the soloists got the chance. Scott knew all those tactics – check the way she creates roaring flames behind Davis and then thins them out to lithe, icicle-like chords behind the flute solos of Jerome Richardson – but she’s an incredibly careful listener. She follows Davis as he goes about building his narrative, responding line by line like a congregation does. She hangs back to let the story unfold, and what she does contribute is always, unfailingly apt.

Just check out “Heat N’ Serve,” one of many cooking-themed titles here. It’s nothing fancy, a spry upbeat blues shuffle. As Davis takes off, Scott limits her accompaniment to crisp jabs followed by open spaces. The dots and dashes from the Hammond B3 grow more syncopated as the solo progresses, ever so slightly ratcheting up the intensity. Each Scott phrase is impeccably placed; her command of the offbeats establishes the absolute perimeters of the time feel, gathering the moving parts of the rhythm section into a mighty yet effortlessly airborne groove. The musicians agree on every aspect of time and that’s because of the way Shirley Scott plays time.

Sure, there are stray moments on the Cookbook records where there’s showboating happening; occasionally the improvisations veer toward cliché. Those are far outnumbered by the classic hard-swinging stuff, explorations that touch down at various points on the tempo spectrum – from junkie-stupor slow to breathtakingly brisk. All of it feels poised, and refreshingly uncluttered, and alive with emotion. Not just technique.

Scott was 24 at the time of these recordings. She went on to further refine her aesthetic across an amazing series of records for Prestige (Soul Shoutin’ with then-husband, the tenor saxophonist Stanley Turrentine, 1964) and Impulse!, including elaborate projects scored by Oliver Nelson (Great Scott!! from 1963) and Gary McFarland (Latin Shadows, 1965). She continued to evolve over decades of music-making that took her in and out of the spotlight, but the building blocks of it, the skeletal essence, is right here.

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