It strikes me as supremely important, in this day and age, to bring back to the jazz idiom the idea of the organ trio. An organ trio, for those not in the know, is a type of jazz combo focused around an organist, accompanied by a percussionist and either a guitarist or a saxophonist. Occasionally the bands would employ both, making them more appropriately organ quartets. Famous musicians who have performed in organ trios include Jimmy Smith (the tops!), Les McCann, Howard Roberts, Grant Green, Tony Williams, Booker T. Jones, Jimmy McGriff, John Medeski, George Benson, Pat Martino and Wes Montgomery.
Of course, as a guitarist, I see the organ trio as mainly a way to give the guitar a more interesting framing than the contemporary bass-drums-second guitar format which is overwhelmingly present today, even in jazz, where until a certain point the guitar was not even considered a jazz instrument. The guitar, with the advent of amplification techniques and the furthering of technique and phrasing theory for guitar in the jazz idiom, is now seen as an essential element of jazz music, and it has been for decades.
Now, my picture for the perfect organ trio of the twenty-first century is something that, I think has existed before in many places and in numerous different iterations, but I'm not entirely certain that it's ever been achieved in this way for quite some time. Picture a band consisting of a drummer, a guitarist and an organist. The drummer is playing a large, versatile drum set, which he uses to play conventional swing rhythms as well as eclectic world-music rhythms and abstract rhythms in unconventional time signatures, with the ability to alternate between these modes tastefully and smoothly--basically, Neil Peart's swing-friendly bastard child, with hints of Tony Williams. The organist is working a Hammond B3, handling basslines with the aid of foot pedals and creating dense superstructures through his chordal comping style, which relies heavily on multiple-octave voicing. His chords sound lush without being too dense--he complements every frequency range without crowding them. When he takes solo breaks and plays melody lines, he does them with versatility, class and originality. The organist is everything that was great about Teddy Wilson, with the classical flair of John Lord. The guitarist, armed with super-strats more commonly associated with heavy metal music, and playing through a carpet-covered Carvin half-stack (likewise associated with heavy metal,) is a natural showman as well as he is a skilled and tasteful jazz performer. His comping style is sparse and tasteful, never allowing himself to step over the organist's melodies--he attempts to limit the number of notes within his voicings, while still making them harmonically interesting. When he solos, he is tasteful while being incredibly abstract, creating textures with echoes of rock and metal while being extremely melodically conscious--he takes off in one way, while at the same time never abandoning the melody of the song at hand. He employs wah-wah, distortion, fuzz, and a bizarre, subtle sense of humor which often involves the interspersion of familiar commercial jingles and folk melodies into his improvisational pieces. He is John McLaughlin, Ritchie Blackmore and the best bits of Joe Pass and Larry Carlton. Each musician would be a showman with a recognizable visual impact as well as being a musician of incomparable quality. Their repertoire would consist of standards going as far back as the earliest days of Dixieland and Ragtime, into the contemporary era, including their own compositions which range from fusion-oriented to post-bop material, and long, fully-improvised sections where anything goes. They are legends of the stage and recorded matter.
I really need to sleep more. Or sleep less--I don't know. I'll find out when I look at this later, when I'll be able to adequately judge if any of this means anything.
No comments:
Post a Comment