Organ Trio Alive and Well on Capri Records

courtesy of Braithwaite & Katz Communications

Last month Capri Records released Equal Time, a new organ trio album that brings rising stars Akiko Tsuruga on organ and Graham Dechter on guitar together with veteran drummer Jeff Hamilton. I have to say that it took me some time to adjust to the role of the organ trio in jazz; but, in light of yesterday’s rant over Giovanni Russonello’s recent articles in The New York Times, I feel it important to observe that I have Blue Note Records to thank for enabling that adjustment. Back when I was building my library of jazz recordings through mail orders from Blue Note and Mosaic catalogs, I responded to one of Blue Note’s “must have” lists by ordering their Jimmy Smith album The Sermon. To be honest, I feel I still have a lot to learn before I can claim to have gotten my head around the title track, which runs over twenty minutes in duration; but listening to Smith had a significant impact on my listening to other organists. (For the record, so to speak, The Sermon did not “make the cut” for Russonello’s article “A History of Blue Note Records in 15 Albums.”) These days, my Saturday morning schedule is such that, more often than not, I have breakfast while listening to the Sirius XM Satellite Radio program Organized, hosted by Joey DeFrancesco and featuring performances on the Hammond B-3 organ.

One of the things that impressed me about Smith was his awareness that, with a B-3, he did not need a bass player. Between the pedal keyboard and the two manuals, he always that the resources to provide his own bass line. As a result, the instrumentation for a trio shifted to bringing in a guitar along with keyboard and drums; and it is clear from DeFrancesco’s program that this approach to a jazz trio is alive and well (even if a text search reveals that the word “organ” never appears in either of the Russonello articles I took to task yesterday).

More importantly, it is clear that those playing in organ trios have much to offer the attentive jazz listener. Equal Time provides any number of tracks to warrant that proposition. Indeed, three of those tracks are Tsuruga originals, along with one composition by Dechter. At the same time, my ongoing interest in looking at history through new lenses is generously satisfied with two major Blue Note tracks, John Coltrane’s “Moments Notice” (Blue Train) and Hank Mobley’s “A Baptist Beat” (Roll Call). (At least Blue Train made it onto Russonello’s list!) Finally, the album closes out with instrumental accounts of two favorite vocals, “I Remember You” (Victor Schertzinger’s setting of words by Johnny Mercer) and “This Could Be the Start of Something Big” (Steve Allen setting his own words).

From a rhetorical point of view, Tsuruga easily shifts her mood to accommodate the respective spirits of each of the eight tracks on this album. Her flexibility of style matters as much to the attentive listener as the diversity of her selections. Those who mistake her more soulful qualities for comforting “background music” will not know what they are missing!