Jimmy Smith

By the time Back at the Chicken Shack comes on, winter listening has fully taken over. The calendar might say January, but the music has moved somewhere deeper and warmer—a meningful bulwark against these dark, cold nights. This record doesn’t brood or hesitate. It doesn’t test ideas or peer over stylistic edges. It just shows up, plugs in the Hammond, and says hello at moderate volume. I listened at 32 on the I/50 …

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Announcing a new approach my listening: a monthly playlist of related albums that I will listen to and write about, discussing cultural connections, impressions, and backgrounds: I’ll tag this series. It’ll provide me with a focus each month, so I’ll know what I’m listening to throughout half the month, anyway. I’ll begin this experiment with a modest-sized list, say around ten albums, and go from there. I figure a …

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