Jimmy Smith, 76

If heroin was the end of the Golden Age of jazz, then old age is the new heroin. With the recent deaths of jazz organist Jimmy Smith, arranger and pianist Bill Potts, singers Lyn Collins and George Scott, it has been a rough couple weeks for American music, especially at this juncture in the ailing music "industry", in which fame always sings louder, and to some sweeter, than talent.

Smith, who died in his sleep on Feb. 8, was probably the greatest loss. A hurricane of improvising genius, an instrumental athlete with a swing like DiMaggio's, Smith turned the Hammond B3 organ into jazz's most total instrument, capable of groans, moans, swells and general badness that turned Bach's axe into a postmodern palette of sheer sound. From his Philadelphia roots in stride piano to his later mentoring of such masters as Jimmy McGriff, Jack McDuff, Joey DeFrancesco and John Medeski, Smith's gusto, energy and incendiary musicality cleared the way for styles like rockabilly and hip-hop, lounge-lizardism and more, all way beyond the scope of the post-bop that he's usually credited with founding.

The day after Smith went to that great club in the sky, Bill Potts broke too. Though never an innovator on the level of Smith, Potts exemplified the talented musicmaking middle-class, those jazz greats who-while they'll never be marquee names, or Verve re-release subjects-are probably living right next door to your parents in suburbia.

Though he went on to write some hard-swinging, sometimes adventurous charts for the bands of Woody Herman, Stan Kenton and Buddy Rich, Potts is best know for his first album, The Jazz Soul of Porgy and Bess, a 1959 gem recorded with an all-star ensemble that was unfairly eclipsed by Gil Evans' and Miles Davis' more classical, some would say tight-assed, treatment of the same Gershwin score.

Then on March 13, Lyn Collins, the Female Preacher, goes and kicks it. Her smash "Think (About It)", and the follow-up, 1975's "Check Me Out If You Don't Know Me By Now", established her as a sexier Aretha, or a more downhome Diana Ross. Lately, she'd been earning her retirement off sampling of her work, most notably by the rapper Ludacris.

Finally, a few days before Collins went to preach in fairer pastures, we lost George Scott, the transcendent baritone for the incomparable Blind Boys of Alabama, an a capella gospel group whose over 35 albums and innumerable live appearances established them as the foremost purveyors of traditional American black music, almost untainted by commercialism even after Establishment success.

As possibly the most vital member of that ensemble (founded in the 50s, at the Alabama Institute for the Negro Blind), Scott was a deep reservoir of emotion in his hollered "jubilee" accompaniments, and a hoarse-sweet lead vocalist whose like hasn't been heard in gospel since Ray Charles himself crossed-over from crossing-over.