Hammond organ for the advanced jazz pianist
Creative ways to master the B3 and similar models
Introduction
In 2002, four years after my final exam jazz piano at the Royal Conservatory, I witnessed a couple of Hammond organ trio concerts with Agnar Magnusson on my holiday in Iceland. It was the time that the digital tonewheel organ (clonewheel) made its breakthrough and therefore it became possible to play a decent compact copy of this instrument. So I bought one, started practicing and founded an organ trio myself. However, my practice routine was far from efficient, as I found out years later. I was just learning the instrument intuitively by trial and error, by listening to records, by copying what I heard, and by taking lessons from organ players such as Mike LeDonne. However, I never gave a deliberate thought on which techniques the players used to make it sound so good. In the meantime, piano students increasingly started asking me how to learn to play the Hammond organ. I saw them struggling with the things I was struggling with, which made me think: is our piano education sufficient in the way of learning to play this instrument? Based upon my research I want to build a method for advanced pianists, that will give them the tools to master the Hammond organ in a more efficient way than I did.
Research question
As an advanced jazz pianist, how can you master the Hammond organ in a creative and effective way?
Method
To answer my research question, I will combine a comparative analysis of selected methods, with spectrogram analysis, and interviews. I will conduct a comparative analysis of exercises presented in the piano and organ methods by Mark Levine (The Jazz Piano Book, 1989), Jeb Patton (An Approach To Comping: The Essentials, 2013) and Tony Monaco (Bass & Comp DVD, 2011) I chose this selection of works because they are class-leading methods and show a vast amount of exercises for the jazz pianist and organist. Further, to understand why certain harmonies and registers for the melody result in big sound differences, I will research the timbre of both instruments using spectrogram analysis.
In addition, to gain insight in the creative approach to playing the Hammond organ, I will interview Mike LeDonne, a leading expert at both the piano and Hammond organ and leader of The Groover Quartet with Eric Alexander, Peter Bernstein and Joe Farnsworth who have weekly concerts in jazz club Smoke in New York City, and Ronnie Foster who played the Fender Rhodes electric piano on Breezin’ by George Benson and organ on Stevie Wonder’s epic album Songs in the Key of Life, and explain typical non-pianistic organ techniques with the gained insights from both interviews.