“…straight out of Blue Note’s heyday. A perfect vintage organ trio record, the kind Jimmy Smith and Grant Green used to make. There’s an urgency to this music that is sometimes missing from modern studio recordings.” – JazzTimes

Steve Smith is most widely known as the legendary drummer of rock band Journey and jazz/fusion juggernaut Vital Information. After playing the Java Jazz Festival with Vital Information in 2011, Smith and guitarist Vinny Valentino had a chance encounter in Jakarta with a Hammond B3 virtuoso named Tony Monaco. An all-night jam session eventually led to a recording studio and the gloriously funky result was Groove: Blue, akin to a classic Blue Note organ trio record by Jimmy Smith. These true musos effortlessly inject a 50-year-old sound into their own compositions, adding a few specially arranged jazz standards along the way, including covers of jazz immortals Miles Davis and Nat King Cole. These guys can play!