(there's a recording embedded at the end of this post)
RIP, Joey DeFrancesco. He was primarily a jazz organist who passed away on August 25th at 51.
He's one of the main reasons I got into playing organ. When I was a kid I heard organ solos on Beach Boys tunes like Fun Fun Fun and Surfin' USA and thought, that's a cool sound. I had started playing piano around then (I was eight or nine) because my aunt gave us her old upright. I was trying to teach myself to read sheet music from easy Beatles arrangement books, so my parents got me "real" lessons. That teacher was a jazz head and showed me some jazz organ. I also heard a lot on a local jazz FM station. Sometime in there, I heard a recording of Joey: a blues in G called Ashley Blue, on a compilation called Organ-ized • An All-Star Tribute To The Hammond B3 Organ. It blew my mind. It still does, every listen.
Joey was kind of a freak of nature in terms of technical ability. Sometimes I thought it was too much - too flashy, too fast - but listening back, it always had soul. It's not always what I'm in the mood to hear, but he knew how to hold a crowd in the palm of his hand and turn the intensity all the way up, and then go higher. I saw him play trumpet at some of his concerts - of course he was great at it - and it turns out that horn had been given to him by Miles Davis after Joey toured with Miles as a teenager. A radio station in Philly had Miles visiting, and they were kinda trying to show off a young trumpet player. Joey was on keyboard in the band. Miles was mostly unimpressed, but asked in his signature rasp, "who's your organ player?" I heard that later, Joey got called to the principal's office and everyone was like, oooh, Jooey's in troouuuble, but he came back to class and said, "that was Miles Davis. He wants to know if I can miss school to go on tour with him." In the last few years, Joey was starting to play saxophone, and of course he already sounded great on that.
I saw Joey play five or six times - I can't even remember how many. I met him a couple times, once when I was about nine and had been barely playing the organ for a year, if that. I told him how much I loved his recording Ashley Blue, and I think I did kind of a mouth-sound-beat-box of it. I remember he laughed and was kind, although I was taken aback that he was smoking a cigarette. Scandalous! One of the last times I saw him was with a trio made of himself, Jimmy Cobb, and Larry Coryell. Larry passed away not long after in 2017, and Jimmy passed in 2020.
Now I've been playing organ for... over 20 years. I got a jazz performance degree (in piano, since the school didn't really have anyone teaching organ - sure, a lot applies, but i also had to kind of study it independently), and have collected far too many organs. Here's an improvised blues in G, like Ashley Blue. Rest easy, Joey, and keep burning it down at the jam session in the sky.

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