Time put it simply in their cover story on the Band back in 1970: "Garth is beyond question the most brilliant organist in the rock world. The fact that Hudson didn't treat his organ as a rhythm instrument was also a novel attitude, only now coming into acceptance as a viable alternative for rock synthesists. Unlike Billy Preston, Felix Cavaliere, Alan Price, and in a different sense, Ray Manzarek and Doug Ingle, Hudson worked in the background, letting the rhythm instruments and vocalists in the Band stand in the footlights while he spun his intricate musical webs so deeply into the fabric of each song that it was almost impossible to separately identify the keyboard parts at all. Where most rock organists fifteen years ago were infusing their organ work with the razzle-dazzle of gospel, Hudson cultivated a more pastoral sound. Rather than sail with the prevailing winds in the '60s, he charted his own course through the Lowrey's softer selection of voices, and plumbed its resources for expressive devices that lay beyond the capacity of the B-3. Traditionally marketed for home use, the Lowrey had little of the meaty intensity that made the Hammond B-3 a more popular organ among rock musicians. Many of them may have been paying unconscious homage to his work when they went out to buy their first phase shifters, or indeed their first synthesizers, yet Hudson did most of his classic work with the Band on a Lowrey Festival organ, a most unusual instrument for the genre. His playing is too idiosyncratic to inspire legions of direct imitators, yet younger players have picked up on his attention to timbres, listened to his habit of blurring the edges of his lines and chords in misty Hudson's influence has been broad rather than deep. Even now, few people have been able to bring songs to life with such exciting and unexpected tone color blends, or develop as original an approach to phrasing rock keyboard solos, as Hudson, the first true rock keyboard virtuoso. The Band released that cut fifteen years ago on the album Music From Big Pink, and although Garth Hudson has turned in many bracing performances since then, "Chest Fever" is all the evidence you need in order to know that no one on any bank of keyboard instruments has ever really been able to match him at what he does best. Stark voicings, an almost mechanical sense of power, yet also a kind of timbral delicacy unheard in rock up to that point. The grinding drone of the unaccompanied Lowrey organ, overdriven to the point of distortion, slashing through deep echo like the wail of bagpipes against distant hills. The text and the photos are copyrighted, please do Garth Hudson Legendary Organist with '60s Supergroup The Bandįrom Keyboard Magazine, December 1983.
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