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Between snobbery and snobbery
Geir Myklebust continues doing God’s work with posting a New Musical Express feature on Jon Lord originally published on March 6, 1971.
Here is how Jon describes the pivotal moment in his musical development:
The group changed its name to the Art Woods and Jon bought a Hammond and became influenced by Graham Bond and Jimmy Smith. But there were still problems.
“We were getting fed up with blues, we couldn’t recreate the sound we would have liked to have done. We were all jazzers really but people didn’t want to listen to it a lot, they started to want to dance. We instilled elements of James Brown and the funky American musicians into the music, playing numbers like ‘Celedonia.’ I got fed up copying Jimmy Smith and looked around for something else to do.”
Jon did find that something else, but purely by accident rather than by design. Though he didn’t know it at the time, it was to have a big effect on his music in later years and at one stage almost lead to the break-up of his group.
“We did one number that was five minutes of organ and drums and one night for no reason I just stuck in a Bach fugue that I remembered and it went down a storm,” he stated. “We had a residency at the 100 Club in Oxford Street and got the same audience every week and they always wanted to hear it.
“That was the first time I ever thought of using classical music. Contrary to what a lot of people think, I didn’t get it from Keith Emerson and he didn’t get it from me. He struck on it at the same time. We did a version of ‘Shake’ that started off with a bit of Tchaikovsky — it got to a ludicrous level — but it worked.”
Read the whole thing in My Things – Music history for those who are able to read blog.
Thanks to Yvonne for the info.
Unauthorized copying, while sometimes necessary, is never as good as the real thing
In case you are interested in part 2 of the interview too, published a week later:
https://we.tl/t-KRe1SL8YNv
(available only some days)
October 30th, 2020 at 19:27Thanks again Jörg. I didn’t want to post the link you gave us because it’s your work.
October 31st, 2020 at 10:41