Okay, Don, your song for today comes from the reigning king of jazz Hammond Organ, Joey Defrancesco.

Here we have an outstanding example of Joey's mastery of the technique of "Noodling" on the Hammond, where Melodies are played as block chords with one hand while the other hand plays the walking bassline, said bassline punctuated by stabs with the footpedals, typically happening on a tritone of the root, to simulate the plucking of a string bass.

The art of jazz music consists basically of taking a well known and popular song that has interesting changes, stating the song at the head as the Melody and then proceeding to improvise on that and at the end, repeating the head once more.

Here we see Joey D doing that fantastically with "Speak Softly" theme from The Godfather movie. Many jazz "standards" have historically come from movie and television themes and other songs originally appearing there.

At the bottom of ALL modern western musics is the Blues. I'm not referring to the lyrics of the blues here, I'm not referring to all that "paid yer dues" thang, but to the fundamental music that is played behind the lyrics, in jazz we try to pay tribute to the many developments that blues music (and gospel musics) brought to the continuing development of western music.

Joey D never loses track of that bluesy/gospel aspect, which can turn almost any piece that has appropriately nice changes into a toe-tapper. And that's important, because music without sung lyrics should emulate DANCE.



BTW -- Joey DeFrancesco can not read music. Like those other rare talents, he somehow bypassed that in favor of just absolutely understanding music theory and patterns innately.


--Mac

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