Organist Larry Goldings brought his trio to SMOKE Jazz Club for the album Rhombus

Larry Goldings, Peter Bernstein and Bill Stewart spent five nights back at SMOKE Jazz Club in New York in August 2026, playing music from Rhombus, the album they made for Smoke Sessions Records. The label belongs to the club, so the run doubled as a record launch on home ground. The Friday-night sets on 21 August, at 6:30 and 8:30, went out free as a stream hosted by JazzTimes, which published Rob Duguay's interview with Goldings on the same day.

The organ trio is an old format and Goldings knows whose shadow he works in. He named Jimmy Smith, Jack McDuff and Jimmy McGriff as the groups his own deliberately departs from, records where the organ sat at the centre, took the melodies and the solos, and left the guitar comping behind it. Goldings said he would rather accompany. He told Duguay he loves the way Bernstein plays melodies, and that what he hopes a listener hears is a group sound instead of a leader with two employees.

Rhombus came out of a tour. The three played a run of dates just before the session and used it to settle what would go on the record, which is why the track list reads like a working book rather than a plan. Randy Weston's Hi-Fly and Thelonious Monk's In Walked Bud had been in that book for years. Irving Berlin's They Say It's Wonderful is older still. Two pieces were new to them: Keith Jarrett's Everything That Lives Laments, which became the opening track and the first Jarrett tune the trio has recorded, and Abdullah Ibrahim's Mamma, which Goldings had only started playing on the road.

Wayne Shorter's Penelope is on it too. Goldings said he does not reharmonise other people's writing much, on the grounds that a player who wants to rebuild a song from the studs may as well write one. What he changes is a chord here and there, usually in the older standards, and the rest he leaves to Bernstein and Stewart to do their own way. The title track is a Goldings original, and he was straightforward about how it got the job: it sounded like a better album title than any of the other tunes.

Thirty-five years is a long time for any band and a very long time for a jazz group that never changed anyone. Goldings thinks part of the reason is that the trio does not work constantly. The three come together two or three times a year, the rest of the calendar is side work and leader dates, and the gap keeps the material from going stale. He called it the longest-running organ trio and possibly one of the longest-running jazz groups anywhere with the same three players.

Streaming a club set is no longer strange to him. Goldings has been playing to cameras since the lockdown years and said he mostly forgets they are running once a set starts, though he rates the video and audio work at SMOKE and is glad people who cannot get to Manhattan can hear it properly. He lived in New York for 16 years and still thinks nothing replaces being in the room. The club end of the business keeps expanding anyway: Blue Note is opening its first UK room in London this autumn.

The instrumentation is having a decent year elsewhere as well. The drummer Florian Arbenz lined up a September tour of Europe with his own organ trio, on the same three-piece footprint Goldings has worked for decades. Our running list of club and concert dates is the tour guide, and everything else we file under jazz sits on the genre page.

What comes next is deliberately vague. Goldings has a newer working trio of Los Angeles players, all three men keep separate careers, and the group books itself only when there is a reason to. The reason this time was a record that opens with a Keith Jarrett tune none of them had put on tape before.