Friday, February 18, 1994

Ride, Capt’n, Ride:
Jack McDuff steers his hot Hammond back to town
By Peter B. King
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

To make it in the jazz world, it helps to have talent. Not to mention hustle. Ask Jack McDuff, who has both. In his big, rough voice, he’ll tell you why, after he began his career as a bassist, he switched to the Hammond B-3 organ.

“I went to work one night and there was an organ sitting there,” McDuff said by phone from his Minneapolis home, sprinkling his conversation with unprintable epithets and a hearty laugh. “That was McKee’s in Chicago. The owner said, ‘Jack McDuff, can you play organ?’ I said, ‘Yeah, I can play it.’ ‘Cause if not, he was gonna hire an organ player. But I had hardly touched it before. I remember I went to another club after I played his club and I asked a barmaid, ‘How do you turn this on?’ She must have thought, ‘What is this?’ “

McDuff, who will play the Balcony this weekend with Roger Humphries, Jimmy Ponder and Kenny Blake, went on to a long and successful career. “Rock Candy” hit big in the ‘60s, and McDuff gigged relentlessly at the jazz organ bars that were once an institution in black neighborhoods.

He nurtured a string of guitar and saxophone players who later became stars in their own right — Red Holloway, Pat Martino and Mark Whitfield, to name a few. His most famous group featured Holloway on sax, Joe Dukes on drums and a young Pittsburgher named George Benson on guitar.

Now 67, McDuff grew up in Champaign, Ill. As a child, he studied piano and, later, upright bass.

After serving in World War II, McDuff gained some notice playing bass for Johnny Griffin. But in 1956, Jimmy Smith whipped up a huge appetite for bluesy, churchy, hard-swinging music played on the Hammond B-3 electronic organ.

“Nothing is the same as a B-3,” says McDuff. “Nothing. That’s the most human sound that there is.”

At first, however, some people didn’t think of it as a jazz instrument. “I remember I was taking my organ in a club in Appleton, Wisconsin, and a guy at the bar said, ‘What are we having, a funeral in here?’ “

McDuff’s training as a bassist and a pianist who walked the bass with his left hand served him well on organ, where the player creates bass lines with foot pedals. After touring with Willis Jackson, McDuff formed his own band in 1959 and criss-crossed the country to gigs.

At the time, organ jazz was a kind of opposite to the avant-garde jazz of Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor and others. The organ sounds were accessible and often musically accomplished without being deadly serious. Audiences didn’t just sit and listen; they shouted and shook.

Pittsburgh went for organ jazz in a big way. WAMO-AM broadcast the music, and tunes like McDuff’s “Rock Candy” sucked dimes into jukeboxes. Pittsburgh’s premiere organ bar was the now-defunct Hurricane in the Hill District.

“Everybody played the Hurricane — Jimmy Smith, Jimmy McGriff, Groove Holmes. Everybody that came to the Hurricane, we opened on a matinee at 5 o’clock in the evening (on a Monday). Birdie (Dunlap, the owner) would always have a crew of guys out there to help hustle the organ inside. You brought it yourself. At first we were bringing it in hearses, then it got to be trailers and eventually a van.”

At another Pittsburgh club whose name McDuff can’t remember, he needed a guitar player. He was directed to 17-year-old George Benson, whom McDuff says was a lousy reader but had a phenomenal ear. There was no time to rehearse.

“We just started playing. And that night I told him he was gonna be OK. He wasn’t playing much worth a damn then, but he was pretty good. And he came in the band. He said in Down Beat last summer that I fired him every night,” recalls McDuff, who has a reputation for getting the sounds he wants from his sidemen — or else.

By the early ‘70s, organ jazz fell out of favor with the public as high- tech electronic keyboards came on strong.

But eventually, a younger generation returned to the Hammond B-3. McDuff credits Joey DeFrancesco, who cites McDuff as his main influence, as the one who brought the B-3 (and McDuff’s career) to life again.

McDuff has a new album, “Write On, Capt’n,” his 69th as a leader. It features four- and five-part horn arrangements by the organist. The record includes DeFrancesco playing trumpet, not organ. And check out the funk versions (McDuff calls them hip hop) of “Night in Tunesia” and “Killer Joe.”

McDuff’s regular road band, the Heatin’ System, includes two horn players. McDuff says it’s “too bad” he can’t bring the band, since he won’t have time to work up his more intricate arrangements with Humphries, Ponder and Blake. But he calls the three Pittsburghers “pros” and notes that he’s played with them before.

Besides, it’s not like the Pittsburghers don’t know organ jazz — Humphries toured with Stanley Turrentine/Shirley Scott, and Ponder has played with McGriff, Groove Holmes and others.

McDuff, who was known as “Brother” Jack until he promoted himself to “Capt’n” a few years back, says audiences still get as crazy when he plays as they did in the ‘60s. The organ still “outswings everybody. If we’ve got somebody to play to, we’ll turn you on. We’ve been lucky, man. Health-wise I’ve been fairly lucky. God, I’m still running just like I was 50 years ago.”

(Peter B. King is a Pittsburgh-based freelance writer.)