Tower of Power's Chester Thompson on Video

Hi, musician and musically-interested friends,

If you have a broadband (DSL, etc) connection and you're interested in how the Hammond organ fits in to funky groove-oriented music like Santana's and Tower of Power's, here's a real treat for you: This month Keyboard Magazine is featuring a short series of videos of Chester Thompson, TOP's (and Santana's) Hammond player, showing us how it's done.

Here are some things I noticed:

- Man, is he fonkay!! This is about the funkiest Hammond playing I've ever heard. Not fast, just cool.
- his drawbar settings are not just the typical "Jimmy Smith" settings, but a bit more, and they're laid out to see in the video.
- His backbeats against his left-hand bass lines are impeccable, as are his chord voicings.
- He plays marcato, leaving plenty of silent spots in there. That can make a huge difference, by the way.
- Nice use of subtle volume-pedal and drawbar-setting moves to create dynamics.
- Notice that he plays two organs; on the "The TOP Groove" and most other spots, he's playing a B3 (chopped by Oakland's world-class Hammond tech Bob Schleicher), which sounds just perfect to me (it gives me a bit of organ lust, heh). On other spots including "Only So Much Oil" and others, he's playing a more recent Hammond-Suzuki XK3 digital emulation, which to my ear, just doesn't quite sound as cool. You can tell them apart by looking at the right end of the drawbar area (just above the top keyboard); the digital unit has a "HAMMOND" logo at the far right end.

For those of you who have asked me how to help other keyboard players play funkier or "rock"-ier, I'd say if they could study these videos it might help them quite a bit!

To view these gems (and I sure hope you do), go to http://www.keyboardmag.tv and then click on "How to Play" and then watch all the videos starting with "CT:" .

Have fun,

- Jim