Trudy Pitts - Legends of Acid Jazz (Prestige)

A recurring choice for when lights are dim at the Taylor cabana, this disc is much like that matchbook with the kitsch-cool cover you keep finding in the breast pocket of your smoking jacket and can’t bear to toss out. Pitts had an encomium-worthy career that sadly didn’t transfer to fecundity on vinyl. She’s the only organist, to my knowledge, to have gigged with Coltrane in their native Philadelphia (where are the tapes!?!) and one of handful of female purveyors on the B-3 who could easily hold court with her male peers. She’s since been shrouded under the shadow of her counterpart in the sisterhood, Shirley Scott; a fate shared by fellow unsungs Gloria Coleman and Rhoda Scott. This two-fer, combining Pitts’ first and second platters for Prestige, is totally of its era. On the first nine numbers the soda pop conga of Abdu Johnson joins the core trio of plectrist Pat Martino, playing a fair bit of acoustic along with his customary hollow-body electric, and drummer Bill Carney (also Pitts’ spouse and manager). All nineteen cuts are draped in the pungent, instantly appealing aura of an intimate lounge date despite their origins in Rudy Van G’s Englewood Cliffs studio bunker. The set is so ripe with atmosphere that you can almost smell the wafting aromatic blend of cheroot smoke, mohair fibers, freshly poured Johnny Walker, and Naugahyde upholstery lingering in the patron booths. Pitts proves herself a pro at building and sustaining ambiance, rotating favorite pop songs of the day (“It Was a Very Good Year,” “House of the Rising Sun,” “A Whiter Shade of Pale”) with bop-tailored tunes from Carney’s songbook. Her command of the organ’s available nuances and willingness to incorporate a wide range of settings from reed-like twitters to thick vespertine fills and narcotic swells ensures that the bromidic nature of some of the material is undercut by an adventurous uncertainty. The summit for me is a rendering of “Eleanor Rigby” where Pitts’ captures song’s sentiments of urban alienation completely without sacrificing a sliver of groove, rubber-stamping her swirling indigo-hued solo with an emphatically hip “Yow!” Don’t let the garish Kool-Aid™ acid test cover art faze you. This is music that targets both the hips and head and sets the tumblers in each to locking on a deeply pleasing groove.