Ron Carter Esperanza Spalding - Downbeat

77th Annual readers Poll
organ
Joey DeFrancesco
winning streak
By Geoffrey Himes // Photo by Erik Kabik
Larry Coryell still remembers the first time he heard Joey DeFrancesco. The guitarist was driving
through Connecticut when the radio played a track from All Of Me, the organist’s 1989
debut album on Columbia.
“I had the same reaction that Joe Sample
later said he had,” Coryell recalls. “I pulled my
car over so I could figure out, Who the hell was
that? Right from the start, Joey was a combination
of Jimmy Smith and Oscar Peterson.
He had Jimmy’s left hand and feet but Oscar’s
right hand. He just sounded better than anyone
else; when you play better than everyone else,
people are going to pay attention.”
If you weren’t a jazz fan then, it’s difficult
to explain the impact made by All Of Me. In
1989, organ jazz was on the endangered-genre
list. The giants from the late 1950s and early
’60s—Jimmy Smith, Jimmy McGriff and
“Brother” Jack McDuff—were still working
but they had been marginalized to small
labels and smaller joints. No new organ stars
had come along in a while. Things had gotten
so bad that Hammond had stopped making its
signature B3 organs in 1975.
“When I sent my first demo to George
Butler at Columbia,” DeFrancesco remembers,
“he was expecting a piano tape, but
I decided to send an organ tape instead,
because that was my first love. Everybody
was against it. Even my father said, ‘Why
are you doing that? The organ is dead.’ This
is early December 1987, when I was 16. Dr.
Butler said, ‘I’ll get back to you in January or
February.’ But he must have put it on, because
he called me on Christmas Eve and said, ‘I
didn’t know you played the organ; this is the
real deal. You sound like you’re 50 years old.’
He went crazy.
“In addition to the bluesy groove, I had a
lot of technique. There were a million piano
players who could play anything, but no one
was playing organ. I was in the studio the
following June. After the record came out,
suddenly there were a lot of organ players
everywhere. The older guys thanked me for
bringing attention back to the organ. And
today it’s stronger than ever. The organ’s current
streak of popularity has actually been longer
than the period in the ’50s and ’60s.”
DeFrancesco has played a critical role in
the organ’s resurgence, and along the way, he
has enjoyed a couple of winning streaks in
the DownBeat polls. With his 2012 victory,
he has now won the Organ category in the
DownBeat Readers Poll for eight consecutive
years. He also topped the DownBeat
Critics Poll from 2002 through 2008.
He’s been on the jazz scene so long that it
was a shock that he could title his 2011 album
40 after his birthday. It seemed that someone
who had recorded and toured with Miles
Davis in the ’80s and had released two albums
co-led by Jimmy Smith would have to be at
least 10 years older.
DeFrancesco had several advantages on
his instrument. First of all, his father, “Papa”
John DeFrancesco, was a part-time professional
organist, playing weekend gigs in the
Philadelphia area. As a result, there was a
Hammond organ and lots of organ records
in the home, and the 4-year-old Joey was so
entranced by both that he learned Jimmy
Smith’s “The Sermon” off the stereo and
played it on the organ for his father one day
after John’s day job. By the time he was 10, he
was subbing for Don Patterson on organ gigs
around town.
“I’m the only organ-first musician I
know,” DeFrancesco says. “All the others
started out on piano. I like the piano a lot, but I
like listening to other pianists more than playing
the piano myself. I prefer the organ because
it’s more challenging. To play the style of the
jazz organ that Jimmy Smith invented, there’s
a lot more going on than when you’re playing
the piano—if only because you’re using three
limbs instead of two.”
You might think that an organist would
play the same role in a trio that a pianist does,
he says, but the organist’s left hand doesn’t
play chords like a pianist’s, emphasizing single-note
bass lines instead. The foot pedals are
used to emphasize certain bass notes the way
a bass player would by pulling and snapping
a string. So who assumes the pianist’s role
in an organ trio? The guitarist, DeFrancesco
answers. They have to play the chords, but
they can’t be fat chords with the root note on
the bottom because those notes are already
being played by the organ. A stabbing, staccato
feel is good, Coryell adds, because the
organ is already taking care of the sustain.
“I have a big problem with some guitar
players,” DeFrancesco laments, “because they
tend to over-comp. If there’s too much going
on, it’s too locked in and you can’t do interesting
things with the drummer. They need
to listen to my right hand and comp behind it
the way a piano player comps behind his own
right hand.”
DeFrancesco is happy with his new guitarist.
He met Coryell on a jazz cruise in 2008,
and the organist soon learned there was a lot
more to the guitarist than his fusioneer stereotype
might imply. Coryell had cut his teeth
playing in organ trios in Seattle and Denver
before moving to New York and was eager to
get back to those roots. He could swing bebop
and soul-jazz as convincingly as he did fusion,
and DeFrancesco quickly said they should
record something together.
That didn’t happen until the organist
found the right drummer. He had always wanted
to work with Jimmy Cobb—the drum-
52 DOWNBEAT DECEMBER 2012