Collection: Shirley Scott

Shirley Scott made the Hammond B-3 sound like a lead voice rather than a rhythm section. Born in Philadelphia and educated at Cheyney University, she came up in tenor saxophonist Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis’s group in the mid-1950s, then built a long run of Prestige records as a leader, among them Great Scott! (1958) and Soul Searching (1959). She also recorded extensively with the tenor saxophonist Stanley Turrentine, to whom she was married from the early 1960s until 1971, and the pairing produced some of soul jazz’s most relaxed tenor and organ interplay. Impulse! issued the live Queen of the Organ in 1964, and the early 1970s brought Mystical Lady, Lean on Me and Superstition on Cadet. She kept recording into the 1990s, including Oasis (Muse, 1989) and Blues Everywhere (Candid, 1991), and taught jazz history and piano at Cheyney.