The late pianist Jimmy Rowles said his voice sounded like a canoe being dragged across a road, and Jimmy Smith's is in the same league - except that the canoe sounds as if it's being pushed across a road by a posse of hungover snails. If Smith's between-blues announcements had been any indication of his condition at the Jazz Cafe on Monday, you'd have thought that the Pennsylvania organ-grinder, 75 next week, was barely expecting to make it though the next tune.
But if the godfather of R&B and soul-jazz on the Hammond organ sounded as if road-life was grating on him, it wasn't apparent from the noise he otherwise made. Since his rise to the big-time in the mid-1960s Smith has always been more than a virtuoso player - he's nothing less than a phenomenon, a man who generated the most personal and impassioned manner of sermonising from an instrument that's rumbustiously anonymous in many hands.
And, for all the current promotion of his upcoming Dot.Com Blues album as a change in direction, Smith has one song really: the churning, exhilarating, backbeat- cracking, riff-shouting organ blues. He doesn't need any others - and his audiences, young or old, don't seem to need them either.
Smith is at the Jazz Cafe until tomorrow, with the local rhythm section of Martin Drew on drums and Phil Lee on guitar. As if initially awed by his septuagenarian boss's ability to keep the groove right in the pocket, Lee maintained the sound of the authentically choppy Grant Green/Kenny Burrell guitar touch on the swingers but occasionally came a little adrift on the timing. But Lee was subtly excellent on the unaccom-panied ballads Smith now invites as an opportunity to take a breather, and the crowd was strikingly appreciative of his Jim Hall-like chordal delicacy.
Old Smith blues favourites, with their shuffling rhythms and eager, wide-grin trills, were inevitably the biggest hits of Monday night. In his departures from the routine, the old stager would usually find a way of hooking the groove back in - as he did with Mood Indigo, which began with billowing chords but ended up with hellfire double-time showers of sound. The calypso St Thomas, a tune long associated with Sonny Rollins, disrupted the leader's usual approach to rhythm and he opted instead for a more fragmentary approach of wild, Wurlitzer-like explosive harmonies and sardonically hooting figures.
Ever the showman, Smith pretended to look outrageously baffled during Drew's drum-break on the same piece. It was hard to tell why. Drew was delivering a supercharged account of the same vivid, earthy variation on the underlying beat that Smith has been used to from the best drummers in the business for half a century.
• Until tomorrow. Box office: 020-7916 6060.
