Results for "organ, Hammond B3"

Charles Kynard

Born: February 20, 1933

Charles Kynard is an organist whose jazz-funk leanings rival his predecessors and peers, though not eclipsing them. Solid, though never flashy. He also plays electric bass. Kynard's album Reelin' With the Feelin' has been sampled and appears on several acid jazz releases. Hammond virtuoso and electric-bass player, Kynard didn't become too famous for two reasons: he just played in his local L.A. instead of touring, and he recorded very few sessions. Nevertheless, his artistry was enormous and his recordings are true gems. He was too busy to devote himself to a successful career as a jazz musician

Bruce Katz

Bruce Katz occupies a unique space where blues, jazz, rock, soul, and the many aspects of Americana all collide into a style of original instrumental music all his own. He is as comfortable playing "soul-jazz" on the Hammond organ as he is playing 1930's style stride piano or the meanest slow blues. Besides leading the Bruce Katz Band, Bruce is currently playing regularly with Gregg Allman, John Hammond, The Organiks and performing with other artists as well. Bruce was also honored as a 2008 Nominee for the Blues Music Award for "Pinetop Perkins Piano Player of the Year", selected by the Blues Foundation. Over the past twenty five years, Bruce has been an in-demand sideman as well as leading his own band

Richard "Groove" Holmes

Born: May 2, 1931

Richard Arnold "Groove" Holmes, Born Richard Arnold Jackson (Camden, New Jersey) was a jazz organist who performed in the hard bop and soul jazz genre. He is best known for his 1965 recording of "Misty," and is considered a precursor of acid jazz. Holmes burst onto the music scene in the early 1960s (his first album, on Pacific Jazz with guest {{Ben Webster = 11235}} was recorded in March 1961). An African-American, literally a heavyweight (approximately 300 pounds) and physically rotund in stature, he gained immediate respect with an inimitable style of his own. His sound was immediately recognizable in the upper register, but even more so because of his virtuosity in creating, undoubtedly, the most rapid, punctuating, and pulsating basslines of all the jazz organists

Bill Heid

Born: August 11, 1948

Bill Heid came of age in the crucible that was Pittsburgh in its jazz heyday, hanging out at legendary Hill District clubs like the Hurricane Bar and the Crawford Grill. All the jazz greats regularly played in town back in the sixties and young Bill took every opportunity to sit in and learn from these masters. In addition to the many musicians passing through town during that period, Pittsburgh had produced some of the greatest names in jazz "Ahmad Jamal, Art Blakey, Errol Garner, George Benson, Eddie Jefferson, Mary Lou Williams, Stanley Turrentine, to name a few, all called Pittsburgh their hometown

Billy Hawks

Born: September 3, 1941

William Hawkes known professionally as Billy Hawks (without the 'e'), was an American R&B and jazz organist. He was born in Richmond, Virginia, and grew up singing, playing piano, and listening to the blues. In 1961 he joined Steve Gibson's Red Caps, and the following year joined the Modern Flamingos. Under the guidance of manager Clifford Doubledee, he formed his own group, the Billy Hawks Organ Trio, in Philadelphia in 1964, with guitarist Maynard Parker and drummer Henry Terrell. The group performed along the East Coast, notably at Atlantic City. He recorded his first album, The New Genius of the Blues, for Prestige Records in November 1966, with Terrell, and with guitarist Boogaloo Joe Jones replacing Parker

Charles Earland

Born: May 24, 1941

Charles Earland came into his own at the tail end of the great 1960s wave of soul-jazz organists, gaining a large following and much airplay with a series of albums for the the Prestige label. While heavily indebted to Jimmy Smith and Jimmy McGriff, Earland came armed with his own swinging, technically agile, light-textured sound on the keyboard and one of the best walking-bass pedal techniques in the business. Though not an innovative player in his field, Earland burned with the best of them when he was on. Earland actually started his musical experiences surreptitiously on his father's alto sax as a kid, and when he was in high school, he played baritone in a band that also featured fellow Philadelphians Pat Martino on guitar, Lew Tabackin on tenor, and yes, Frankie Avalon on trumpet. After playing in the Temple University band, he toured as a tenor player with McGriff for three years, became infatuated with McGriff's organ playing, and started learning the Hammond B-3 at intermission breaks. When McGriff let him go, Earland switched to the organ permanently, forming a trio with Martino and drummer Bobby Durham. He made his first recordings for Choice in 1966, then joined Lou Donaldson for two years (1968-69) and two albums before being signed as a solo artist to Prestige. Earland's first album for Prestige, 'Black Talk!', became a best-selling classic of the soul-jazz genre; a surprisingly effective cover of the Spiral Starecase's pop / rock hit 'More Today Than Yesterday' from that LP received saturation airplay on jazz radio in 1969. He recorded eight more albums for Prestige, one of which featured a young unknown Philadelphian named Grover Washington, Jr, then switched to Muse before landing contracts with Mercury and Columbia. By this time, the organ trio genre had gone into eclipse, and in the spirit of the times, Earland acquired some synthesizers and converted to pop/disco in collaboration with his wife, singer / songwriter Sheryl Kendrick. There followed a succession of successful jazz / soul / funk albums including 'Odyssey' in 1976, featuring 'Intergalactic Love Song', 'The Great Pyramid', featuring 'Driftin' and perhaps his best remembered album from this period 'Revelation', featuring the Randy Muller (Brass Construction) produced 'Let The Music Play'. He moved into the Eighties with 'Coming To You Live' featuring 'The Woman In You' and the title track. There were further CBS outings with 'Street Themes' and 'Earland's Jam'. In 1983 he released an odd twelve inch single entitled 'It's A Doggie Boogie, Baby', popular on the UK dancefloors. Sheryl Kendrick's death from sickle-cell anaemia in 1985 left Earland desolate, and he stopped playing for a while, but a gig at the Chickrick House on Chicago's South Side in the late '80's brought him out of his grief and back to the Hammond B-3. Two excellent albums in the old soul-jazz groove for Milestone followed, and the '90's found him returning to the Muse label. Earland died of heart failure on December 11th, 1999, the morning after playing a gig in Kansas City, he was 58.

Bill Doggett

Born: February 16, 1916

William Ballard Doggett was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. His mother, a church pianist, introduced him to music when he was 9 years old. By the time he was 15, he had joined a Philadelphia area combo, playing local theaters and clubs while attending high school. He later sold his band to Lucky Millinder, and worked during the 1930s and early 1940s for both Millinder and arranger Jimmy Mundy. In 1942 he was hired as The Ink Spots' pianist and arranger. In 1949, he replaced Wild Bill Davis in Louis Jordan's Tympany Five. It was there that he first achieved success playing the Hammond organ and he is also reputed to have written one of Jordan's biggest hits, "Saturday Night Fish Fry", for which Jordan claimed the writing credit

Barbara Dennerlein

Born: September 25, 1964

Born in Munich, Germany, in 1964, Barbara Dennerlein fell in love with the Hammond organ sound at an early age. She was eleven when the first home organ was given to her for Christmas. After only one and a half years of lessons she decided to continue autodidactic, relying upon her highly visible talent. She began to develop her own inimitable style and finally her jazz enthusiastic parents decided to buy an original Hammond B3.

Barbara became acquainted with the history of the instrument and went on her own journey of discovery in the world of music. In addition to studying the classical repertoire of standards, she also began to compose her own numbers very early on. Following first performances as a thirteen-year-old, she began to play in clubs at the age of fifteen. In the early eighties she was already fêted as the “organ tornado from Munich”.

Papa John DeFrancesco

Born: September 12, 1940

On September 12th, 1940, John DeFrancesco was born in Niagara Falls, New York, the son of a remarkable Sicilian-born musician, Joe DeFrancesco, who was a member of the Dorsey Brothers swing band and had the uncanny ability to quickly learn and play nearly any musical instrument. Exposed to music at an early age by his father, John DeFrancesco began playing bugle and trumpet at age 6. After forming a band with several school mates, DeFrancesco played his first professional gig at just 13, at a local nightclub in Niagara Falls. In 1959, at age 19, DeFrancesco encountered jazz organ legend Jimmy Smith and the course of John’s life was seemingly forever altered

Joey DeFrancesco

Born: April 10, 1971

Joey DeFrancesco’s emergence in the 1980s marked the onset of a musical renaissance. Organ jazz had been a form of music that literally went into hibernation from the mid-seventies to the mid-eighties largely because of the introduction of high-tech, light-weight keyboards. It was Joey, however, that ignited the flame once again with the sound of his vintage Hammond organ and Leslie tone cabinet.

He not only illuminated this once dormant music form but brought back the many proponents of jazz organ who had been shuffled by record producers and club owners to lesser roles within the music industry. Befriending and supporting those who preceded him, Joey became the new-age proponent of an instrument that had been pushed aside in favor of the growing technology. Considered a child prodigy, Joey remembers as far back as age four, playing jazz tunes modeled by his father, Papa John DeFrancesco and memorizing music from the many jazz albums in their home. Papa John, a jazz organist himself, took young Joey under his wing and nurtured his rapidly developing skills, bringing Joey along with him to gigs, Joey would sit-in with as many seasoned Philadelphia musicians who were around.