Back in the mid- 60s, Hammond B3 legend Jimmy Smith got together with guitar icon Wes Montgomery for a made in heaven summit meeting. Add some charts by Oliver Nelson’s orchestra and you got a pair of albums that are revisited here with Christian McBride, organmeister Joey DeFrancesco and six stringer Mark Whitfield. The Big band includes some hard hitters like Ron Blake/ts, Freddie Hendrix/tp and Steve Davis/tb, propelled by Quincy Phillips.
The horns wail like a Holiness Congregation as McBride and Phillips propel Whitfield and Joey D through an avalanche of “Night Train” and the swaying “Down By The Riverside”. DeFrancesco makes the walls shake on a boogalooing “Road Song” and the horns sound like V8 with Whitfield at the wheel on “Milestones”. The two get dainty on Whitfield’s own “Medgar Evers’ Blues” and in a quartet setting he is graceful on “The Very Thought Of You” with McBride as thick as Beef Ribs BBQ’d on “Up Jumped Spring. A bouncy “Don Is” has composer DeFrancesco sublime, and Davis glides through a hummer of “Pie Blues”. This puts the fun back in funky!