Don Patterson ”The Exciting New Organ Of Don Patterson”

Don Patterson

”The Exciting New Organ Of Don Patterson”
( LP Prestige Records, 1964 )
Catalog # PR 7331

Tracklisting:
‘S About Time
Up In Betty’s Room
Oleo
When Johnny Comes Marching Home
The Good Life

Personnel & Notes:
Booker Ervin (ts)
Don Patterson (org)
Billy James (d)
Leonard Houston (as)
Recorded at Rudy Van Gelder Studio,
Englewood Cliffs, NJ, May 12, 1964

Review:
Great album with Booker Ervin on tenor sax.
By Michael Erlewine (AMG)

Review by Jazz Organ Fan:
This cat can really play the organ! Great sound, astonishing technique, good phrasing.
A great recording.
A few comments:
The version of ‘A Good Life’ is really beautiful!
I think that this is the version that Joey DeFrancesco has had as an inspiration for his way of playing this song (from the record ‘The Incredible! released 1999) There too many similarities between those two versions to be just coincidence (drawbar settings, phrasing, a very special use of chorded staccatos, etc).
Regarding the take of S’bout Time we can hear how very difficult it is to keep an uptempo modal song going for long… I mean this is a 10 min take, and I think maybe 5 – 6 min would have been more adequate in this case. The reason is that this is basically a modal composition of a chord shifted up a half step and than back again (like Coltranes Impressions). And it is very difficult to keep such a thing going for a prolonged period of time, especially uptempo, without loosing steam or ideas, no matter if the musicians are very skilled.
When it comes to Oleo we have an interesting thing! Just 3 second into the song we can hear how the organ melody line disappears and then comes back after a second. What I believe happened here is that Don Patterson played wrong, and not just a small neglectable error. But as he played so fantastic through the rest of the take they decided too keep the take despite his error in the very beginning.
There are a couple of reasons for my belief:
-The sax is not dispappearing at the same time at 3 second.
-Neither are the drums.
But listen very carefully at the organ bass line and you will find that it has an altered sound, not much lower in volume but a little muffled. What I think they did is that they user an equalizer or a filter to cut out the melody error.
Well, I might of course be wrong on this.
Anyway, this is a really great record, with Oleo and A Good Life as highlights.

By Pier