The late Jimmy Smith's exciting improvisations were saturated with blues, gospel and R&B, and his influence is immeasurable. Smith was a key reference point for just about any working jazz or rock organist in the ‘60s and ‘70s. He played in a variety of settings in the course of his long career, but he's probably best known for his trio outings, which provided him with the opportunity to stretch out and display his one-man-band-like abilities. (He often played bass parts with his instrument’s foot pedals.) The trio on this 1963 keeper — Smith, drummer Billy Hart, and guitarist Quentin Warren — smokes on the uptempo pieces, as the group takes the music higher and higher. A cover of Ray Charles’s “I Got a Woman” starts off with Smith ripping through some fierce blues runs before the band kicks in, but the album’s highlight is a version of Dizzy Gillespie’s “The Champ.” The trio pushes the envelope on this high-energy burner: Hart slices up time, Warren’s chords slash at and around the beat, and Smith works himself into an ecstatic frenzy. A mellow version of the standard “If I Were a Bell” closes the album, bringing the listener gently down from the wild ride of “The Champ.”