Johnny Smith Walk Don T Run Rar

• Johnny Smith Walk Don T Run Album
• Walk Don't Run Movie Youtube
• Walk Don't Run Song

Walk, Don’t RunJim Carlton: What was your reaction to the Ventures recording ‘Walk, Don’t Run’?Johnny Smith: Somebody was really looking out for me, Jim. I had an accident in an airplane then. I was a flight instructor and I got into this airplane and the backseat came down and ripped off the end of my ring finger. This was around 1963, just about the time the Ventures’ recording made a hit.

If it hadn’t have been well, to start with, it began with Chet Atkins. Chet had made a recording of ‘Walk, Don’t Run’.He came to see me in Birdland one night and asked if he could record this song. I said, “Well sure, go ahead.” He said, “No, I’m not gonna do it unless I can show you how I’m going to do it in my style.” So, we went back to a little dressing room there at Birdland and guys were shootin’ up and lightin’ up laughs and Chet was in a state of shock laughs. But anyway, he sat down and played his version for me and I thought it was terrific.

Johnny Smith Walk Don T Run Album

So he did it and the Ventures heard his recording and that’s how they came to record it. And it started to become a big hit around 1962 or ‘63 when this accident with my finger happened. I was out of commission for a whole year. Even though we had the music store, it wasn’t making any money because we were building inventory and so forth. So actually, without the Ventures’ recording I don’t know if I could have survived there.

Woefully obscure and unlauded today, Johnny Smith's early '50s recordings make him as important to the development of jazz guitar as his contemporaries Stan Getz and Al Haig are to the history of the tenor saxophone and the piano. Johnny who?For a very short while, Smith was a star. His '52 single 'Moonlight In Vermont,' featuring Getz, came out of nowhere—Smith was then an anonymous staff musician at NBC, New York—to become a massive coast-to-coast US radio and vinyl hit. Downbeat voted it record of the year.

After that, despite recording half a dozen of the most transcendentally beautiful guitar albums you'll ever hear, Smith rapidly faded from view. Partly this was his choice: he preferred working as a staff musician for NBC to carving a living on the New York club scene. By the early '60s, he'd had it with big cities altogether and—his bank account high on composer royalties from the Ventures' twang rock cover of 'Walk, Don't Run!' —relocated to Colorado.

Walk Don't Run Movie Youtube

Walk Don't Run Song

The fifteen minutes were up.At last, after decades of unavailability, Smith's A-list recordings are becoming obtainable again. Last year, Roulette reissued the defining '52/'53 singles and 10' collection, and now the every bit as timeless and magical '54 set Walk, Don't Run! Is back in the racks.Smith's technical and harmonic mastery are both awesome, and his instantly recognisable style is characterised by lush, complex, legato chordal voicings, interspersed with lightning-fast runs, all executed with a rich, lustrous sound and precise articulation.

Yet he doesn't use technique as an end in itself, only to extract the last filigreed nuance of beauty out of a melody or a chord progression. Apply all this to some of the most shimmering tunes in the Great American Songbook and you are definitely knocking on heaven's door.Most of these tracks last little more than two and a half minutes—the length of an average theme statement today. Yet such is Smith's eloquence and focus, that he can make time stand still and give a forty-five second solo something of the substance of a Shakespearean sonnet. Arnold Fishkin and Don Lamond, held over from the Moonlight In Vermont sessions, provide unobtrusive but intelligent accompaniment, as does second guitarist Perry Lopez. It would be ridiculous to single out individual tracks for special mention—though did 'Lover Man' ever sound more smitten or 'Autumn In New York' more romantic?—for every one is a miniature masterpiece.First degree genius bliss from a neglected master of American jazz.