Jim Alfredson

Man, this is kick-ass! I gotta get it!

Man, they just got done playing a BAD Billy Preston gospel track. That dude does things with the organ unlike anything I've ever heard.

Someday this will be Soul Stream and I...

Don't know if this has been posted on here yet, but if you dig Hammond grooves, there's a pretty cool internet radio station called Leslie Overdrive. They even play tunes by a certain organ trio from Michigan with it's own crazy forum! B)

Mike, there's a NEW one that came out last month with Sam Yahel under Kisor's name. Battlecry IS smokin', but I haven't heard the new one yet. I bet's it just as good, though!

That indeed would make a robot cry. Then he would get angry and use his super strength to kill everyone in the record store.

Could someone who subscribes to this magazine send in a correction please? Do they have a website and/or email and I can send one myself? I sent them a CD for review a few months ago, by the way....

Congratulations!!!!!!!!!!!!

It's on Candid. She had three records on Candid and all are very nice records. She made them right before she got sick from complications of Fen-Phen. I believe Skylark has her playing piano, but I can't remember. Two of the Candid releases are organ affairs and one is piano. She is a very fine pianist!! She can play piano just as good as she plays the organ, so don't let that dissuade you.

I think this is more of a server problem and not a PM or board problem. My website was transfered over to a new server (same company) on Sunday and maybe the kinks have yet to be worked out.

The pre-Smith organists have basically been covered. Fats Waller first played jazz on a pipe organ and then also on the Hammond. Dogget was a Hammond man as well as Wild Bill Davis. So why did everyone play Hammond? I think because it was really the first inexpensive and relatively portable electric organ. The Hammond Co. sold a lot of them to black churches that didn't have the money to afford a real pipe organ so many blacks had their first exposure to the instrument there and transformed it to sound nothing like a pipe organ. There was a B2 but there was no B1. The lineage is like this: The Model A came first. This looks like a B3 but not as deep (ie, front to back) and has no vibrato or chorus. These were first made in 1935. Then came the BC which used an extended case to fit the new chorus generator in. Also around the same time came the model C, which was the same as a BC but had a church style case (ie, with woodwork that extended all the way to the floor, not spindle legs like the b series). Then the BCV which was just a BC with a vibrato unit installed (usually in the field... ie, on organs already in service) and the CV. In 1949 the first B2 and C2 organs came around. These are as close to a B3 and C3 as you can get. The one difference is no percussion circuit. The percussion is not a drum machine or anything like that. It's a circuit that takes the signal from the last drawbar and converts it into a "ping" at the front of the note on the top manual. This is an integral part of the Jimmy Smith sound. The first B3s and C3s were made in 1955. There are no internal speakers in either the B3 or C3 organs. Hammond did start making the A100 series which are a B3 in a more decorative cabinet that DOES have internal speakers. You can also hook up a Leslie to them. Dan Wall plays one. Jimmy Smith truly did revolutionize the instrument. Before him it was basically a novelty. Wild Bill Davis and Bill Dogget did some nice stuff but the best way to describe their style is "roller-rinky". They liked BIG drawbar settings and BIG chords and BIG accents and to most modern listeners it's going to sound real cheesy. Jimmy Smith was the first to get away from those drawbar settings and play fast, bop-oriented, single-note lines on the organ with his own drawbar setting that no one had used before (and everyone has copied since). He was also the first to use a combination pedal/left hand technique for his basslines which made them more fluid and allowed him to accent like a real bassist. McDuff, McGriff, and Holmes learned straight from Jimmy Smith. He taught them directly. I'm not sure about John Patton. Jimmy Smith called Don Patterson the only organist who could keep up with him. Larry Young was the first to break away from the Smith school and approach the instrument from more of a McCoy Tyner direction. Joey D is a faster, cleaner version of Jimmy Smith. He's a monster player, but more of a stylist, not an innovator. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that. He single handedly brought the organ back from near extinction. Larry Goldings and Sam Yahel are out of the Young camp, although they really sound nothing like Young. I think their approach is the same, though. Bill Heid is a Patterson and Young disciple (they taught him directly) and should be heard by everyone on this board. He's plays stuff that makes you swear it's Larry Young. As far as other organs... Hammond, like I said, was the first electronic organ. Others followed quickly but none sounded as good. Hammond started losing ground in the late 60s because there were other manufacturers taking over the home theatre organ market which is where Hammond wanted to be. They never really recognized the people who made their organ so popular which were the rockers, the blues folks, the jazzers and the black churches. They continually marketed the organ to white folks who wanted to play "Tico Tico" at home with nutty, poorly synthesized sounds and rhythm machine accompianment. As such, in 1974 they abandoned the aging tone-wheel design and went to transistorized sound. And thus went out of business. There are a few records around with organists playing other types of organs. There's a Groove Holmes/Jimmy McGriff duet record from the 70s on Groove Merchant, for instance, where they are playing some Thomas organs I think. Sounds horrible. Nothing could compete with Hammond for a long time... everything sounded extremely weak and cheesy by comparison.

Wes & Jimmy. Wes & Jimmy. Only TWO albums. That shit ain't right. They should've recorded 22 albums together. They tear it up!!!! Wes & Mel are great, too. That tribute disc "Remembering Wes" is really nice as well although the sound quality isn't great.

If you mean the people that take him seriously then yes.

That is a total bunch of crap. Body shops... actually ANYBODY, can match the paint of any modern car by taking the VIN to a dealership. Using the VIN, they will get you a little can of paint that was used on YOUR car directly from the maker and it will match perfectly.

Since I'm still on my music hiatus, I haven't re-listened to this record but I just wanted to tell this little anecdote. I first heard the tune "Soul Woman" played by an organ trio in Detroit at a BBQ ribs and chicken joint (best damn BBQ I've ever had, by the way...) The trio was Chris Codish on organ (a student of Bill Heid's) a drummer who I cannot remember, and one of the baddest unsung guitarist I know of... Perry Hughes. Perry is a BAD BAD BAD man. Why he isn't more well-known is beyond me. He can hang with ANYBODY. Benson? No problem... Martino? No problem. The dude is super bad. Anyway, they played that tune and after the set I asked Chris what it was and he hipped me to the record. I think I actually got a TOCJ dub from someone on the Bluenote Board. I cannot remember who but thank you! I was happy when the Rare Groove came out and I could see the great cover art!! That tune is still one of my favorites and we play it in Organissimo.

Soul Stream has a point. With all this re-mastering eventually the BN tapes are going to disintegrate and become useless. It seems like someone at BN would realize this and transfer all the tapes, once and for all, into a high resolution format that they could then re-master to their heart's content. Current digital gear can now do 24-bit, 192kHz recording with no problems and some custom gear can go higher than that (just talk to Telarc). This is far above and beyond CD and even beyond DVD-A playback resolution. It seems like the smart thing to do would be to transfer all the tapes to a dependable, redundant array at the highest resolution possible and then leave the original master tapes ALONE! I'm glad I've got the TOCJ of "The Way I Feel" I can tell you that.

The long and short is that RVG used a combination of mics on the Leslie speaker and a direct line off the Hammond's internal pre-amp. Remember, a B3 does not have any speakers of it's own. The Leslie is apart from the organ. And Leslie was not owned by Hammond. It was a seperate company that made speakers for electronic instruments (mainly organs). In fact, Hammond himself disliked the Leslie speaker and for awhile forbid his dealers from selling them with Hammond organs. But that's another story... As discussed in the Anderson thread, the organ in Rudy's studio is a Hammond C3 (same as the B3 except for the cosmetics... different case...) and a Leslie 21H speaker. I just got a 21H of my own in the last two weeks and I think it's the best sounding Leslie I've ever heard. The "standard" model for the B3 is the Leslie 122 which appeared in the 1960s I believe. The 21H appeared in the 50s. The 21H uses a field coil woofer and an amp with four 5881 tubes (you can substitute four 6L6's) whereas the 122 amp uses only two 6L6 tubes. The 21H has more power, more bass, and a fantastic high end. Anyway, I think Rudy experimented with the mixture of mic'd and direct sound throughout the years. On the BN sides he used a lot of the mic'd sound. I have some records from the 1980s, however, on the JAM record label with Jimmy McGriff and it sounds like almost ALL direct sound. The Hammond sounds very different when heard directly. The Leslie speakers have a distinct color that they impose on the sound. For instance, they cut off a lot of the very top end of the organ which affects the amount of key click. This can be a good or bad thing depending on who you talk to.

WOW! Who would've thought?! Thank you all for making this such a great community and welcome all the new members! We've been getting a lot in the last week or so! Make yourselves at home!

I love this quote. Trane is talking about who influenced him in his early years and who he was listening to. He mentions Pres and then...

I've never heard Coltrane actually speak. This is wonderful. For those that are interested I'm recording the stream via Cool Edit Pro for my own archives.

Some cat bought the Black Jazz catalog a few years back and has been re-issuing it. I have the some of the Doug Carn sides. Nice stuff. Worth listening too. I also have Chester Thompson's organ record and it's pretty hip. He was the organist for Tower of Power back in the day...

That was a fucked up call! Unsportsman-like behavior??! What the hell was that? I'm not a Bucs fan nor a Colts fan and yes the Bucs should've never let them tie it up in the first place, but that last call was stupid.

Mel Rhyne is a bad dude. All of his Criss Cross CDs are worth picking up. Fantastic playing by all involved.

I didn't care for his last record and this one seems to be more of the same. I'm also turned off by the media blitz that's been happening surrouding it's release. In one day I heard an interview with him on NPR and then saw him on 60 Minutes later that night answering the same questions with the same answers. His last great record, IMO was Ten Summoners Tales.

I know this is the NFL page, but I'd like to say that I think it's bullshit that Michigan is ranked higher than Michigan State considering Michigan just lost to Iowa and State spanked them last weekend. Oh, and State's record is better. But oh well. Michigan is always over-rated.