Chords, voicings and melody
There are an impressive amount of possibilities for chords, voicings and melody on this instrument. The piano is a one-person-orchestra. So is the Hammond organ, but there are plenty differences in what works and what doesn’t. When it comes to chords, voicings and melody, the most important thing to remember for pianists as soon as they hit organ is:
Separate the bass from anything else!
Back in the day it was very common to play bass notes on the piano. With its jazz roots in ragtime and stride piano, the bass is prominently played on the first and third beat. In blues and boogie woogie one can find lots of bass notes as well. Those bass notes are very close to the rest of the left hand voices and these voices can be pretty low.
Another type of voicing piano chords with bass notes is to play shell voicings. The shell voicing is an indispensable basic structure that serves as the basis of building many jazz piano voicings. It became popular during the bebop era, used frequently by Thelonious Monk and Bud Powell.1 Shell voicings are played in the left hand and consist of either the root and the 3rd, or the root and the 7th. They are ideal to build upon with your right hand. With more modern pianists, like Bill Evans, Herbie Hancock or Chick Corea, the bass notes are less prominent. Still you can hear the 3rd and the 7th, with all the building blocks upon. A perfect example of how those voicings can be executed is displayed on your right, taken from Mark Levine’s The Jazz Piano Book.
Getting back to the Hammond organ, remember what I just stated: Separate the bass from anything else!
This means that shell voicings, as played by pianists, are out. A 7th sits too close to the root for separation and forget about the 3rd, which is an even smaller interval. Remember what those small intervals did to our spectrogram.
During my interview with Ronnie Foster, a very funny coincidence happened. Mr. Foster spontaneously started playing Stella by Starlight on his piano and it reminded me about the comparison I made, in which I played “Stella” on piano, exactly the same way on organ and how an organist would play it on organ. I told Mr. Foster about what happened. For the record, Foster plays it in G while I did it in B-flat.
BW: I did something funny with that song, because I recorded it on both piano and organ with exactly the same voicings, and it sounded terrible on Hammond!
RF: Yeah, those things don’t work. They don’t translate you know.2
So once again it is confirmed: separate that bass from anything else. Separation of an octave or more is normal. Sometimes you will find the bass and the second lowest voice closer to each other, but these voices are usually up high on the organ. Take a look at Tony Monaco’s blues example taken from Bass & Comp.
The 3rd and 7th are played by the right hand, while the left is playing bass. Voicing the chords is therefore limited to building your voices around that 3rd and 7th in your right hand, as long as you are playing bass with your left.
The big variation in voicing organ chords is in what register you put your voices, the duration of your voices and how you are moving from one chord to the next.
Watch how Tony Monaco demonstrates this in the outtakes from Bass and Comp at the bottom of this page.
