Soul jazz is the most immediately enjoyable style in the whole of jazz, and the one most likely to convert someone who thinks they don’t like the music. This is a guide to the albums that define it.
By the late 1950s, bebop had made jazz a music for close listening. Soul jazz was the correction: blues form, gospel phrasing, a heavy backbeat, and a Hammond organ where the piano used to be.
It was also commercially successful in a way that made critics suspicious at the time, which is why several of these records took decades to be taken seriously. They have all outlasted the objection.
Start Here: Top 5 Soul Jazz Albums
The Sidewinder — Lee Morgan (the crossover hit that defined the sound)
Song for My Father — Horace Silver (the most enduring composition in the style)
Back at the Chicken Shack — Jimmy Smith (the Hammond organ record)
Mercy, Mercy, Mercy! — Cannonball Adderley (recorded live, and it shows)
Alligator Bogaloo — Lou Donaldson (the loosest and funkiest of the five)
1. Lee Morgan — The Sidewinder (1964)
The Sidewinder is the album that made soul jazz commercially viable, built around a boogaloo groove and one of the most recognisable riffs in jazz.
Morgan was 25 and had already been through Art Blakey‘s Jazz Messengers. The title track ran past ten minutes, became an unexpected hit, and reportedly caused Blue Note to chase the formula for years afterwards.
The rest of the album is stronger than its reputation suggests — Joe Henderson on tenor throughout, and writing that has more to it than the groove.
2. Horace Silver — Song for My Father (1965)
Song for My Father is the most covered composition in soul jazz, and an album that holds up completely beyond its famous title track.
Silver wrote the title piece after a trip to Brazil, and the bassline was later borrowed by Steely Dan for “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number”.
The record captures a change of band mid-stream, with tracks from two different Silver quintets, and the Joe Henderson and Carmell Jones line-up is the one most people remember.
3. Jimmy Smith — Back at the Chicken Shack (1963)
Back at the Chicken Shack is the definitive Hammond organ jazz album and the best starting point for anyone new to the instrument.
Recorded in 1960 but not released until 1963, with Stanley Turrentine on tenor, Kenny Burrell on guitar and Donald Bailey on drums.
Smith effectively invented how the Hammond B-3 is played in jazz — bass lines with the left hand and pedals, melody and comping with the right. Almost every organist since has worked inside the vocabulary he established here.
4. Cannonball Adderley — Mercy, Mercy, Mercy! Live at “The Club” (1967)
Mercy, Mercy, Mercy is the rare soul jazz album that reached the pop charts without softening anything.
Joe Zawinul wrote the title track and plays electric piano on it, six years before he formed
Weather Report. The record was billed as a club date, though the circumstances of the recording have been debated since.
Cannonball’s spoken introductions are part of the appeal, and they capture a way of addressing an audience that has almost vanished from jazz.
5. Lou Donaldson — Alligator Bogaloo (1967)
Alligator Bogaloo is the loosest and most danceable record on this list, recorded almost by accident when a session ran short.
Donaldson was a bebop alto player who moved decisively towards groove, and this album — with Lonnie Smith on organ and a young George Benson on guitar — is where that shift produced his best-known work.
It has been sampled extensively in hip-hop, which is how a large part of its current audience arrived.
6. Stanley Turrentine — Sugar (1971)
Sugar is the CTI-era soul jazz album that most successfully bridges the 1960s Blue Note sound and 1970s jazz-funk.
Turrentine’s tone is the draw — big, vocal and blues-rooted — and the band includes Freddie Hubbard and George Benson.
If you find the earlier Blue Note records slightly stiff, this is the one that loosens.
7. Grant Green — Idle Moments (1965)
Idle Moments is the most atmospheric album in Grant Green’s catalogue, and a soul jazz record played at walking pace.
The title track runs close to fifteen minutes because the band misread the arrangement and played an extra chorus — a mistake Blue Note kept because the take was too good to discard.
Joe Henderson and Bobby Hutcherson are both on it, and Duke Pearson wrote the title piece.
8. Jack McDuff — The Honeydripper (1961)
The Honeydripper is one of the great organ-and-tenor records, with a young Grant
Green on guitar.
McDuff played with more grit and less flash than Jimmy Smith, and this album is the clearest statement of what separated them. Jimmy Forrest is on tenor.
9. Ramsey Lewis Trio — The In Crowd (1965)
The In Crowd took a piano trio into the pop charts and won a Grammy doing it.
Recorded live in Washington, DC, with an audience clapping along, and built on a cover of a soul hit rather than a jazz standard.
Purists disliked it at the time. It remains one of the most joyful records in this style, and Lewis went on to a long and successful career on the back of it.
10. Big John Patton — Let ‘Em Roll (1966)
Let ‘Em Roll is the organ record for people who already own the obvious ones, pairing Hammond with Bobby Hutcherson’s vibraphone.
That combination is unusual and it gives the album a cooler, stranger quality than most soul jazz of the period. Grant Green is on guitar.
11. Shirley Scott — Queen of the Organ (1965)
Queen of the Organ is the essential album by the most underrated Hammond player of the era.
Scott recorded prolifically through the 1960s, frequently with tenor saxophonist Stanley Turrentine, to whom she was married for part of that period. This live date is the best single representation of her playing.
12. Jimmy McGriff — Electric Funk (1969)
Electric Funk is where soul jazz crosses fully into funk, with horn arrangements and a rhythm section that owes more to James Brown than to Blue Note.
It sits at the far edge of this list and points directly at the jazz-funk records of the following decade.
Where to go next
Soul jazz leads in two directions. Backwards, it takes you to hard bop — Art Blakey, Horace
Silver’s earlier Messengers work, and the whole Blue Note catalogue of the late 1950s. Forwards, it becomes jazz-funk, and the same musicians turn up on records by Donald Byrd, Grover Washington Jr and the Crusaders.
The organ is the thread worth following. Jimmy Smith leads to Jack McDuff, Shirley Scott, Big John Patton, Richard “Groove” Holmes and Charles Earland, and from there to Dr. Lonnie Smith and Joey DeFrancesco, who kept the instrument alive through decades when it was thoroughly unfashionable.
Which soul jazz album would you put first? Let us know in the comments below.
More guides to albums, musicians and jazz history in the Jazzfuel archive — or sign up for the Weekend Edition newsletter for a jazz reading list every Saturday.
