Typical playing techniques on piano and Hammond organ

Let us get back to the research question: As an advanced jazz pianist, how can you master the Hammond organ in a creative and effective way?

We went through how both instruments work, what their harmonics let us do with the sound, how we effectively can use the harmonic characteristics of both instruments for voicing our chords well, and how to apply dynamics and rhythm. Now it is time to display several playing techniques to get creative. Since the research question is addressed to pianists learning to play the Hammond organ, I will focus more on organ than on piano in this section. However, some techniques like single lines and block chords/locked hands apply to piano as well and an advanced jazz pianist is known with these techniques.

Single lines

Almost always done with the right hand on both instruments and sometimes in octaves on piano, single lines are comparable to any other musician’s improvised lines of single notes. On piano you can accent certain notes by adding more weight or finger action to them, or “ghost” the notes by hardly playing them. This creates lots of swing to the rhythmic feel, when done right. The advice I always heard from other jazz musicians is: listen to the established records. And for Hammond organ this is no different. What is different is the way of accenting notes. Especially with percussion on, you can accent notes by lifting the fingers off the keys before hitting the note you want to accent, as percussion only works when the notes are not connected. As far as the notes go, if the line sounds good you can literally play it the same on organ. You just have to take care how it sounds rhythmically.

Block chords or locked hands

Now we are getting to a topic that is quite different on organ compared to the piano To see the difference clearly, we must first define what block chords are. To play block chords is to harmonize the melody or a solo line, both hands locked together and moving in the same rhythm … In fact, block chord playing is sometimes called locked hands. The number of notes played varies from style to style. Bill Evans often played block chord solos with a single note in the right hand over a four note voicing in the left hand. Red Garland played two-handed chords of seven or eight notes. George Shearing often plays four notes in the right hand, one in the left.¹

On organ, when playing left hand bass and tapping on the pedals, the difference becomes clear immediately. Block chords sit in the right hand and consist of four or even five voices. Some organ players even reach for block chords with four voices and a range of a minor 10^th.

Squabbling

This technique is strictly Hammond organ, but according to Mike LeDonne it comes from Erroll Garner’s right hand. Erroll Garner played block chords in his right hand, while playing chords on each quarter note beat in his left. These block chords would have all kinds of rolls and would be rhythmically very free, almost behind the beat but never dragging.

MLD: “I guess it’s an acquired taste. Some people don’t like it actually. It’s a funny sounding thing. One of the guys who did it really great was Jimmy McGriff. He really plays some squabbles man and it’s very simple. All those rhythmic things that they do on the organ, which is something that of course also Jimmy Smith created ... Basically it’s supposed to sound like the right hand of Erroll Garner.”

BW: “I was just thinking about Penthouse Serenade.”

MLD: “That’s right. That’s where it came from and it’s what Jimmy Smith meant when he was talking about creating that sound, because he was really good friends with Erroll Garner. He decided that he wanted to create a sound like Erroll Garner on the organ, and so you had the guitar strumming four, like Erroll’s left hand and he could do the squabbles in his right hand against it. And he could do sort of that Erroll Garner back in the time thing.”²

The typical drawbar setting for squabbling is 800008888. The percussion is turned off, chorus/vibrato is set to C3 and the Leslie spins fast. Here is an example of Jimmy Smith playing Our Love Is Here To Stay.³ And this is the way Erroll Garner plays the same song.⁴

Backing off with the expression pedal

I addressed this topic already a little bit in the dynamics part, but this technique can be applied in quite some situations:

– just after every quarter note beat during walking bass for extra attack

– after hitting a chord in a ballad

– after finishing a slide and ending on a chord during a ballad

– during a single line to emphasize the attack of that note

– during an all drawbars pulled out part of the song to avoid blowing the audience’s ears out

In all situations you can pump the pedal back in to get more volume, highs and lows. Just watch out with the last situation, because it can get really loud if you do this while having the drawbars set to 888888888. Watch a very good example of using the expression pedal as Shirley Scott uses it all the time.⁵

The organ crawl

This aspect expands on the on/off principle and especially the “on” part of it. We have already seen that the right foot manipulates the sustain pedal on piano and the expresiion pedal on organ, which means there is no sustain pedal on the Hammond. This is where the organ crawl comes in. Basically what you do is you stay on the organ with your hand and you slide to the nearest possible voicing of the chord. This is not a “slide” as explained later, but a gradual move from one chord to the other without any notes in between. You can play some grace notes to make the switch from one chord to the next more smooth.⁶

Holding a note while playing other notes simultaneously

The perfect climax builder. This technique gives an enormous boost to a solo and is usually followed by pulling all drawbars out and switching the Leslie to spin fast for the ecstatic part of the solo. Satisfaction guaranteed! It is a sound that can be heard on recordings by Jimmy Smith, Richard “Groove” Holmes, Charles Earland, Chester Thompson, Mike LeDonne and many others, so textbook Hammond organ playing. Literally hold the note, usually the root of the chord on which you start the note, with you right thumb and play lines above it, or with your right pinky and play lines underneath. In my list of examples Jimmy Smith puts another take to this and lets the Leslie spin while holding the note and he does not put all drawbars out. Another good example is Chester Thompson doing this on the legendary Tower of Power tune Squib Cakes.⁷

Fluttering

I mentioned the waterfall keys of the Hammond organ in one of the passages of my interview with Ronnie Foster. The Hammond organ’s keyboard does not have an edge at the tip, like piano keys have. Combined with the lightness of the keyboard action, it is very suitable for fluttering, sliding and swooping around. The flutter is basically a series of fast drop downs with the hands, randomly on the keyboard. You can hear Lonnie Smith do this on Freedom Jazz Dance, where the difference in bite between the lower and upper part of the Great makes for a very realistic wah-wah effect.⁸

Slides and swoops

I would say these are very much connected with the aforementioned organ crawl and omnipresent in organ playing. Since this is a technique that belongs to the staple of the organist’s repertoire of effects, I had to ask Mike LeDonne about it.

BW: Can you mention some typical Hammond effects, like slides or “the crawl”, sustaining and connecting the chords while playing a ballad, that pianists don’t know about?

MLD: I would say Shirley Scott was the genius of that stuff. Jimmy Smith too. When he would play chord solos, he would swoop around almost as if he was playing eighth notes with chords. It’s really just fluttering his right hand around, while he’s going between chords. It sounds like he’s playing some kind of line. He might slide down the keyboard to the next chord. All of that stuff is real organ stuff to me … As long as you’re using it with some musical sensibility and it’s not just some BS that you do to get some applause. That’s the other side of the organ. The organ can be corny, because you could get house on organ easy. You put that Leslie on and you start swooping around, doing all this kind of corny stuff and people go: whoa, incredible! It’s just superficial. If you keep the substance of the music in there and the organ can be profound and also very joy-inducing. That’s why I love it.⁹

Watch Wild Bill Davis as he starts playing some slides at 1:28.¹⁰ Another good video to watch so you can see how slides and swoops are done comes from the Youtube channel called The Gospel University.¹¹ I would say that swoops are even more random and longer than slides. At 4:36 you will have a perfect view on this technique.

Creative drawbar settings

Next to the standard 888000000, 888000008 or 888888888 for the Swell and 838000000 or 848000000 for the Great, there are of course many more settings. Nine to the power of nine to be precise, which makes 387.420.489 combinations for one set of drawbars. It would not make sense to list the result of all of them, would it?

Since the Hammond organ was invented to create sine waves as pure as possible, it really is an electromechanical synthesizer and there you see a similarity with modern-day synthesizer: the need to imitate acoustic sounds. On the Keyboardservice website there is a long list of suggested drawbar settings that would imitate trumpets, saxophones, clarinets, flutes and lots of other instruments, as well as drawbar settings used by famous organists or used in famous songs.¹² One of the most creative drawbar setting I encountered during this research is shown by Jack McDuff’s rendition of Gershwin’s classic It Ain’t Necessarily So, namely 000000000. This does not mean there is no sound, because the sound that you hear comes from the percussion being on and set to 2nd, normal and slow. That way Jack McDuff would play this song with an entirely different sound than you would expect.¹³

Switching between preset A# and B keys quickly

Lastly, I would like to explain an effect made clear by Ronnie Foster: switching between preset A# and B keys quickly.

BW: Are there any signature-sound effects that you are using, like slides or swoops or crawling the chords?

RF: There’s one thing that I do that’s kind of a secret (plays the organ with an effect I do not recognize).

BW: Is that moving the drawbars? It sounds like a wah-wah.

RF: No, it’s done with the presets.

BW: Oh! Larry Goldings does that.

RF: Oh yeah. I never tell anybody how I do it. They have to watch. If you listen to Sweet Revival, a record that I did, there’s a song called Some Neck.¹⁴ I use that there.

These are quite some effects the pianist can dive into when he or she wants to “jump on the organ”, as Mike LeDonne called it. I would like to end this section before going to the conclusion by quoting his view on what those pianists need to realize and do the most.

“To me the main thing is to hear that instrument. It seems like the simplest thing: you really gotta hear organ, you gotta listen to organ players and it’s good to really see organ players live too, because that made a big difference for me.”¹⁵

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