Artist News
A New Album Celebrating The Organ And Guitar
Russ Spiegel’s new CD “Nitty Gritty” explores the guitar-organ combination.
The right combination complements and brings out the best in one another: coffee and donuts, hamburgers and French fries, and pie and ice cream, to name a few. In the arena of music, there are instrumental combinations that are so natural together they seem to be almost created for one another. One such combination is the Hammond B-3 organ and the guitar. There is something about how those two instruments go together sonically. There is also something in how their respective musical roles complement one another. Jimmy Smith and Wes Montgomery set a benchmark with this combination. Jack McDuff and Pat Martino, Joey DeFrancesco and Paul Bollenback as well as Lonnie Smith and George Benson have all set their own benchmarks.
Russ Spiegel, who for years was a New York-based guitarist, grew up in Los Angeles but makes his home now in South Florida. An outstanding guitarist with several CDs to his credit, Russ is also an actor and TV and film composer with his new CD Nitty Gritty, he explores the guitar-organ combination.
JB: Tell us about your overall goals in making your new album Nitty Gritty.
RS: The music on the previous two albums Wait A Minute! and Caribbean Blue was dedicated to my writing and arranging and only had my original compositions. On Nitty Gritty, I wanted to showcase my guitar playing – getting to the nitty gritty of it, as it were. I have always had an eclectic approach to playing the guitar in terms of styles, genres, and instruments – and I chose and arranged a number of standards that I often play live, along with some originals I wanted to record with this group.
JB: “Soul Station” is a great song. Why open the album with this Hank Mobley classic?
RS: I find creating a song order for an album is always a challenge, as the first tune can bring people in or turn them off to the rest of the album. “Soul Station” just felt like a great tune to establish the direction of the album, with the guitar out front and paying homage to the jazz organ trio. The tune has a kind of built-in bluesy, gospel vibe, which I find quite poignant to my approach to guitar playing. I’m not sure if Kenny Burrell ever played this, but I kind of went at it from that standpoint.
JB: I love your samba treatment of Ellington’s “Prelude to a Kiss.” How did you know it would work so well as a samba?
RS: For about a year I had a residency at a local hotel in Coconut Grove here in Miami, and the emphasis was always on the Latin side of jazz. I was playing nylon string guitar with acoustic bass and drums, and as I am continually expanding my repertoire – plus have a love for Brazilian guitar styles – I tried this tune out, and it felt just great as a samba! I would say I was inspired by the great guitarist Bola Sete’s work with Vince Guaraldi, and I also have to give a shout-out to Nelson Faria for his great work, The Brazilian Guitar Book, from which I was able to develop a lot of my chops in this genre.
JB: It is interesting how you double the guitar with the organ on John Lennon’s “Norwegian Wood.” Kurt does a great job, but why feature the electric bass on it?
RS: The idea of doubling the guitar with the organ came to me when we were rehearsing for the album. It just adds such a beautiful texture to the tune, and then I love Jim’s comping, which has a real ‘70’s prog rock vibe. Originally, I was just going to record this in trio, as I was going for an approach similar to Pat Metheny’s Bright Size Life where Jaco Pastorious got lots of playing room. I felt that this would be an ideal vehicle for electric bass, and Kurt Hengstebeck is such a monster player I was sure he’d deliver a great performance, which he did!
JB: Were your four original songs composed for this album? Talk about the compositional process of a couple of the songs.
RS: “Nitty Gritty” and “Lonely Buddha” were both conceived for this album. For “Nitty Gritty,” I found a cool little two-chord riff for a dominant 13-chord voicing I learned from listening to the great Canadian jazz guitarist Ed Bickert, and that was the genesis of the song. What can I say? I love groovy, bluesy tunes, and the inspiration for this one are the recordings of John Scofield with Medeski, Martin, and Wood, along with all the many great soul songs of the ‘60’s I grew up listening to.
As to “Lonely Buddha,” there’s a lot I could say about the title of this tune, but I’d rather leave it to the listeners to work out for themselves. Its musical inspiration came from my working on an idea of tonal harmonic movement with a nod to Ahmad Jamal. It’s the only true blues on the album, but it is also different in that its I and IV chords are major 7ths, and it is in ¾ time. I live in South Miami and often go on walks through the neighborhood. After I had the harmony for the tune, I needed to come up with a melody that worked over it and developed the melody while going for a walk. I often can figure musical problems out that way.
For the other two originals, my song “Deep Brooklyn” was actually composed way back in the mid-2000s as I was living in deep Brooklyn near Newkirk Avenue and was dealing with some personal setbacks. I feel the tune emphasizes a somber moment in time but ends powerfully and uplifting, which I needed at the time. “Epic” was written maybe five years ago and is the closest thing to a fusion jazz vibe. I cranked up the overdrive on my solo and went for a more legato, Holdsworth-like approach. It’s also in 5/4 time, which helps give it its “epic” feel.
JB: Tell us how you came up with the interesting arrangement on “A Man and a Woman?”
RS: This song is the title track to the eponymous movie and the composition – which won an Academy Award for best song – was written by the French composer Francis Lai. When I perform ‘A Man and a Woman’ at my shows, I like to ask the audience if they recognize the tune. It’s such a classic composition, and everybody thinks they know it, but most listeners are unable to place it. I love the play of the melody with its languorous (dare I say sexy?) 6/4 bars and its wonderful harmonic motion. And what a great coda!
JB: You do a nice treatment of Coltrane’s “26-2” and those interesting chord changes from Bird’s “Confirmation.”
RS: Thank you! I just love John Coltrane’s multi-tonic concept – I usually try to do at least one tune with it on every album – and there is something about both the harmonic movement and melody of this tune that Coltrane built on Charlie Parker’s “Confirmation” that is just so much fun to play. I came up with a harmonic/rhythmic figure based on the first eight bars of the song, and it really felt good to play this as a funky jazz-rock number. This tune is also a great vehicle for monster saxophonist Tim Armacost to blow on and also features our drummer, Lucas Apostoleris.
JB: Why close the album with another contrafact (from “Jeepers Creepers”), “Four Brothers” of the Woody Herman orchestra?
RS: Haha! I actually had no idea that it was a contrafact! I’m constantly digging into the vast jazz catalog and expanding my repertoire. I had often listened to this song (I think I may have even played the big band version at some point), but one day I decided to learn this wonderful Jimmy Giuffre tune and was struck how much its melodic and harmonic organization reminded me of a mambo. I did want to stay true to the overall arrangement of the composition and adapted the Woody Herman big band version to the mambo rhythm and approached playing the melody like I felt Grant Green might have done.
JB: What instruments did you use for this album?
RS: Since this recording covers a huge swath of jazz-related genres, I ended up using a bunch of different guitars. For “Soul Station,” “A Man and a Woman,” “Besame Mucho” and “Lonely Buddha” I took out my 1978 Gibson ES-175. On “Deep Brooklyn,” 26-2” and “Four Brothers” I used my Fret-King John Ethridge Elise. Since I was going for a more Scofield-like sound on “Nitty Gritty” I opted for an Ibanez Artstar AM153QA and a good old Fender Strat for the more legato-style overdriven “Epic.” For acoustics, I played a Cordoba Fusion 14 nylon string guitar on “Prelude to a Kiss” and a Taylor 314 on “Norwegian Wood.”
JB: What amps and effects did you use?
RS: Even though the studio had a number of different Fender amps I could have used, I ended up pretty much-recording everything through my Quilter Aviator Cub! It is just an amazing-sounding amp. This time around for effects I kept things pretty simple, mostly using an EFX Soul Food overdrive and OCD distortion, along with an MXR Reverb and a Truetone tap delay. I think I might have used a little bit of TC Corona chorus on one or two tunes, and of course, I always have my trusty Ernie Ball volume pedal.
JB: What do you hope listeners will think about this album?
RS: Hopefully they will think I can play a number of different styles well enough to sound authentic and that this album conveys a lot of vibes that they can relate to. I do hope it opens up some doors so I can take my music to more people.
JB: Do you have any touring plans?
RS: As a matter of fact, I’ve got a crazy trip planned this summer that will take me to England, Scotland, Northern Ireland, The Republic of Ireland, Germany, and Central Europe, along with some hits in Australia and Singapore with hopefully more coming up shortly.
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