Jimmy Smith, the jazz master who made his name on the Hammond B3 organ, died on Feb. 8 at the age of 76. He was recognized as a true revolutionary, the man who took the organ out of the ballpark and into the clubs, creating a sound that became an essential part of the jazz vocabulary. He was one of the greats.

I’ll never forget the first time I heard Jimmy Smith. It was my freshman year in college, and I was still in the full flush of my first crush with the blues. I had grown up playing piano, so when I started exploring blues roots, it was the ivory-ticklers that caught my ear. As I swapped platters with other music hounds at school, I was quick to praise the likes of Otis Spann, Jimmy Yancey, and Champion Jack Dupree.

Around that time, I met Jed, also a keyboard player, also in love with the roots. But when I talked of Otis Spann, he talked of Jimmy Smith.

Smith was his idol, the man whose spirit he tried to channel every time he sat down to his own B3 and set the drum speakers whirring. Jed loaned me two albums — The Incredible Jimmy Smith and Back at the Chicken Shack — and at first spin, I knew what all the fuss was about. It was fluid, it was passionate, it was driving, it was cool. It was jazz and blues and gospel and sweat and it sure sounded good to me. Jed had worn out his vinyl; I wore out my tapes of his worn-out vinyl. In later years, I added a few digitally remastered Jimmy Smith CDs to my collection, but I still can’t put ‘em on without thinking of the faded Maxell cassette tape that hatched my full-tilt Jimmy Smith conversion. I still have that tape.

I saw Jimmy Smith live only once, in the late 1990s, in Austin, Texas. He was playing on the patio of a trendy martini bar that fancied itself a jazz club. Tickets were expensive there, and the drinks were too, and my wife and I were reliably thin on spending cash. What else could we do? We stole down the alley behind the club and perched above the sunken patio, nestling ourselves among the trash cans and grease traps of a streetful of tony gin joints and soulless dance clubs.

Standing there above the din, the smell of last night’s rotting leftovers floating through our noses, we had a god’s-eye view of the master, over his back and shoulders and onto the keys where his fingers worked furiously. It was a great show, as I knew it would be, and we couldn’t help but holler our appreciation from our illicit roost. Once or twice, Jimmy looked up and behind him. He could have shouted us down as the bunch of back-alley freeloaders that we were, but he didn’t. He just nodded and smiled and turned back to his work, making that organ of his whisper, shout, weep, and moan, and sing on into the night.

I said it that night, and I’ll say it again: Thanks, Jimmy.

(Jay Hardwig is a writer and teacher. He can be reached at smardwig@charter.net)