Hammond B3 Organ Legend Jimmy McGriff Dies
Tuesday, May 27, 2008
Jimmy McGriff, the jazz musician most associated, after his childhood friend Jimmy Smith, with the classic swinging sound of the Hammond organ, died at the weekend aged 72. A pianist first of all, and also a bassist, he was a military policeman during the Korean war and later a cop in civilian life in his home city of Philadelphia where he also began to take the Hammond B3 seriously in the late-1950s.
In the following decade he gigged around Philly with his own group and also accompanied singers such as Carmen McRae, making a mark with an instrumental version of Ray Charles’ ‘I’ve Got a Woman’ and developing his style and reputation on the Solid State label, after three years at Sue. He later opened a night club in Newark, New Jersey called the Golden Slipper, and then in the 70s retired briefly from the music business. But reissues of his records kept his reputation high and he returned to record albums such as Red Beans and then forged a good working relationship with the Milestone label. In the 1980s he teamed up with alto saxophone player Ray Crawford, and in more recent years experimented with a customised Hammond XB-3 organ. Along with Jimmy Smith, McGriff proved an inspiration to the 1990s revivalist acid jazz movement in the UK and he was a frequent visitor to the London jazz clubs.