Jim Alfredson

-_-

With Plas Johnson.

B)

B)

I mean, listen to this!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Bill Heid's "Dombei"

Rooster don't tell me you don't have a decent stereo at home. That's not right.

I'm hoping you have a second copy of A Go Go. This isn't another one of those greasy records you sell and then you're gonna kick yourself later, right?

Soul Cages is probably my favorite record of his. I think he was at his lyrical best. Very poetic and filled with great imagery. One thing that I've been thinking about lately. On that 60 Minutes interview they said he makes $2000 a day from the royalties of "Every Breath You Take". $2000 a day for one song. They also said his net worth is $300 million. Wow! And Kenny Kirkland died of a drug overdose in NY. You know what I'm sayin? How much do you think Kenny was making at that time? All the musicians he's used to make his records... are any of them making that kind of money? I mean I realize he's the star and the song-writer but come on... none of those records would've been what they've been without the musicians. Just makes you sad if you think about it.

I need to get the Select. Man, I thought my CD buying days were over but I must get those new Criss Cross releases with Sam Yahel on them and Moon Rappin (still haven't even heard that one yet) and Mother Ship and the Patton Select and the Red Holloway discs and....

No I agree with you. I remember when I first heard those Prestige sides. I had to double-check the personel. "Is that really THE Larry Young? Maybe it's his dad." Like I said, maybe he was just super bad! Or maybe he went down to the crossroads...

I agree that Reuben has the groove and sometimes that's all you need. That said, I don't own many of his albums. Without opening another can of worms (you remember that bout, Soul Stream?) I will say that for me he's in the league of Charles Earland. Can groove like a motherfucker, but once you've heard one record you've kind of heard them all. I have his "Masters of the Groove" disc and it's nice but I don't play it as often as Sam Yahel's trio disc or some McDuff! What I want to know is WHY ISN'T LEON SPENCER RECORDING?!?!?!? Now that dude is BAD! And BTW, I keep harping on it and I'll say it again. Bill Heid is the real deal. He was taught IN PERSON by both Larry Young and Don Patterson. Now there's a connection!

Count me in, please.

Yeah, it's pretty amazing. Then again look at the circumstances. Unlike our scene today, he had the opportunity to play in clubs that appreciated the music every night and really hone his skills. I don't know about anyone else, but my advances in playing usually come as a plateau, not a gradual slope. It seems like I practice and practice and practice something and don't get there and then all of sudden I have it. It was that way with kickin' pedals and getting my left hand independent of my right. I mean, I've gotten better on both with practice, but when I first tried to play pedals I couldn't get my foot to work at all without constantly thinking about it and then one day I just didn't think about it anymore. So maybe that's what happened with him. He just shed, but was constantly searching for what was in his head and then all of sudden, at the right time, it just came to him. Or maybe he's just a bad motherfucker.

Dude, WD-40. No kidding. Goo gone is pretty powerful stuff. Might eat thru the CD. I've used WD several times with no problems. Just use a little on a cloth and wipe away!

My guess would be a combination of Soul Stream and Sangry's assessments. He probably had an idea of what he wanted to do before he got to Blue Note but Prestige didn't want to stray from the formula. And before he made his first record for Blue Note he probably shed his ass off!!!!

Prayer Meetin' is a great CD. I was listening to that one today. Stanley is PREACHIN'!

BILL HEID BILL HEID BILL HEID BILL HEID!!!!!!!! Y'all need to get hip and get Uncle Bill's stuff. He's Larry Young's direct disciple.

Actually most pipe organs have three manuals or more. The reason is like you said... you can have different registrations set up on each one and switch quickly between them. In the picture I posted, a B3's drawbars are represented by the bottom illustration. The top illustration is for the spinet models like the M3. As you can see there are a total of 20 drawbars. The first nine are for the top manual, the middle two black ones for the pedals, and the last nine for the bottom manual. This is a photo of the New B3 discussed above, but the layout is the same. Check out the set of reversed keys at the far left. You see how the ones that are supposed to be white are black and vice versa? These are actually presets that are hardwired in the back. Hammond organs had presents 40 years before synthesizers did. Amazing. You'll notice a whole bunch of drawbars, too. 38 of them, in fact. Two of the preset keys for each manual are dedicated to switching between two banks of drawbars. In other words, you have two sets of nine drawbars for each manual that you can manually set yourself and then switch between them. Then you have the hard-wired presets that you can switch between in the back. Obviously you have to set those before you go out and play. They come set from the factory with classical registrations. But it's real neat. You can set up a couple of different sounds on the drawbars and then just hit those preset keys and BAM! You instantly have a new registration at your disposal. As far as parts, most of the electronics of the Hammond are still available. It used common electrical components. All the tubes it uses are still being made. The biggest thing are the mechanical parts. If a tonewheel goes out or your key contacts start to go, you have to sacrifice another Hammond. Luckily there were many different models that are very much alike and are very numerous, so parts are not too hard to find. As far as a book, there has been a decent one written about the history and the players and such. It's called "Hammond Organ: Beauty in the B". I have the first edition which has some mistakes but there's a second edition out now.

Hammond didn't go out of business in the 70s, they just stopped making the tonewheel based organs like the B3. They switched over to transistors in 1974. I think they went out of business in the 1980s. The Hammond name (and the Leslie name for that matter) were bought by Suzuki (not the motorcycle company... another Japanese company with the same name) in the 1990s and they started making single manual (manual = keyboard) digital keyboards that were only made to emulate the Hammond B3 type organs. With Joey D came a resurrgence of the instrument so more and more synth manufacturers got into the act and started making Hammond clones. None of them sound very good, however. Just recently Hammond-Suzuki started manufacturing a full sized replication of the B3 called the New B3. It is the same size as an old B3 but uses digital technology to create the sound. They also make full sized modern Leslies to go with the organs. Joey D and Tony Monaco play the New B3 on their new joint release. I haven't played one but I heard from my mentor who got his hands on one at the NAMM show in LA a few years back that it's close but no cigar. The keyboard doesn't feel right and the sound is all right but no where near as ballsy and idiosyncratic as a real B3. The other HUGE factor is that the New B3 costs a staggering $20,000!!!! It's insane. Only churches or very rich people can afford one. The market for the old B3s is very much alive and prices have only gone up in the last few years, although they've started to level out. You can get a good condition B3 with a Leslie for about $4000. A mint condition would be about $6000. They made over 250,000 B3s in it's 20 year run, so there are plenty still out there. And luckily they are a product of what my dad calls "Post War Over-Engineering" so really, if they are properly maintained, they will last forever. But it is kind of scary. Who knows how many will still be operational in 50 or 100 years... Now for your terms: Chorus - This is an effect that Hammond devised to "animate" the sound of the organ. One of the biggest complainst about the electric organ is that it's sound is too staid. It's very pure. The chorus circuit in the Hammond organ copies the output and then takes that copy and sends it through a delay line of resistors and capacitors that slightly delays and detunes the sound. They add this to the untouched original sound and you get a chorus effect... ie, the sound has "motion"... it's much more interesting because there isn't just a pure sine wave coming at you. It's like a singer singing a pitch with vibrato. The invention of the Leslie speaker was another solution to this problem. Don Leslie invented the speaker to simulate the pipes of a real organ. When you're in a church with a pipe orga, the pipes are spread all across the room, sometimes in front of you and behind you or even to either side. As the organist pulls the stops he opens up certain ranks of pipes and the sound comes at you from all over! The Leslie is simpy a pair of rotating speakers that throws the sound out all over the room to try and simulate the pipes, but of course it sounds nothing like that! The sound of the Leslie, however, is way cool! Drawbar - the drawbar is the way you create sound with a Hammond. Rather than use stops like on a pipe organ Hammond uses drawbars. They are literally what the name implies: A bar that you draw out towards you to add harmonics to the sound. There are nine drawbars per manual (keyboard) and each is tuned to a different harmonic, just like the stops on a real pipe organ. The first drawbar represents the 16 foot pipes, the second the 8 foot pipes, and so on. The drawbars go from 0 to 8 as you pull them out. 0 being no sound and 8 being all the way out (pulling out all the stops!) For instance, the classic Jimmy Smith lead sound is 888 000 000 with third harmonic percussion on and C3 chorus selected. In other words, the first three drawbars are pulled all the way out and all the rest are all the way in. Above is a picture from an original manual that came with most Hammond that taught you how to use the drawbars. Very simple, really. You just pull them in and out until you get a sound you like.

Ryan Kisor is a great player. You should pick up his Criss Cross dates, especially the older one with Sam Yahel on organ... it's burnin'. There's another one that just came out that I haven't heard yet, but I bet it's just as good. Walter Blanding is a fantastic player. Remember my Album of the Week pick? It was his Criss Cross record. Was Wycliffe Gordon with them? The trombonist? He's the MAN! He has a new record with Sam Yahel on it (on... you guessed it... Criss Cross as well) that I HAVE to pick up. We've been thinking of asking him to be on our next record. BAD dude!

They should've called the record "All Butts Are Off"

After listening to this for awhile I have to say one thing: STOP PLAYING THAT STUPID DAVID SANBORN CRAP!! The Billy Preston is worth it, though!!

Add all the copy protection schemes you want... nothing can stop someone from making an analog copy, as they themselves point out in the article. Once you feed the analog signal into the computer then you have a digital copy without copy protection and the record companies have wasted even more money. Stupid.

Although it was just a pre-season game, the Pistons lost against King James and the Cavs tonight. The Cavs looked confident and played very well. Detroit looked like the didn't quite have things together yet. I have to say that I'm very wary of Larry Brown. We'll see what happens this year but I wasn't too impressed by their first game.