The hammond organ? “It’s like parmesan cheese, it goes well with everything.” Alberto Marsico

The great Italian hammond player Alberto Marsico presents three very different projects in Ascona this year: with singer Sonja Priehn, with Andi Appignani and the Organic Brew group, and with a choir for the traditional gospel concert to conclude the festival: all three not to be missed.

Alberto Marsico ©JazzAscona – Photo credit Gioele Pozzi

Alberto, you are a pianist and hammond organist. However, I read that you have been playing the Hammond organ exclusively since 1994 after attending Jack Mc Duff’s seminars in Genoa. What did Mc Duff do to convince you and what perks does the organ have on the piano?

The Piano and the hammond are two instruments that sound the same but are actually very different. If you hold down the key on the organ, the note lasts indefinitely, but on the piano it does not; on the other hand, if you are on the piano and press the key in a hard way a loud sound comes out, if you press softly a light sound comes out, while on the organ regardless of how you press the keys the volume stays the same. If you play the piano well, it doesn’t automatically mean you play the organ well, and vice versa. I started playing the piano at the age of 10. Then at the age of 14, thanks to a friend, I discovered Jon Lord of Deep Purple, and with him the hammond organ in rock music. The jazz hammond players, starting with Jimmy Smith, the most pyrotechnic of them all, I discovered later, listening to the albums of my father, a guitarist and jazz enthusiast. The turning point was in ’94 during that weeklong masterclass with Jack Mc Duff. Fantastic musician, whom I knew on record, and who, as they say, turned me inside out.  He had a unique way of playing, he did wonderful left-handed bass lines (and I also play bass, so go figure, I was going for it) and he had a simple but very effective and very bluesy style. In short, I fell in love with it. I said to myself, okay the organ is for me, I’m going to buy one and now here I am. 

Organic Brew ©JazzAscona – Photo credit Gioele Pozzi

I read a quote by the great bassist Jimmy Woode on your website: “As if he invented the genre, Alberto Marsico, following the lead given by Jack Mc Duff and Jimmy Smith, reminds us of how the blues should be played and digested.” A nice compliment!

Jimmy and I met in the late 1990s. By sheer coincidence we were both guests at the home of an American concert organizer who lived in Germany. In the evenings we would go and play at the same club, me first and then him, the star was him evidently. During the day we would be together and he would tell me a thousand things, what he had done with Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and people of that caliber. I can still see him, one morning, as soon as I got up, going down to the kitchen in his bathrobe and cooking me perfect bacon eggs: he told me for hours about Ellington’s life and miracles. Woode was a man of incredible sweetness and sympathy; he, like me, loved the blues. And he appreciated how I played….

You cover various genres with your music. In Ascona you play with three bands. Can you introduce us to them?

The hammond organ is a bit like parmesan, an instrument that goes well with almost everything and finds its place in rock, gospel, soul, funk. And everywhere its sound lets strong emotions pass through. With Sonja Priehn, a very good singer, we have a project that has been going on for two years, the record that we present here is called “Believe”.  It is a duo, where there is a lot of room for both of us. The repertoire ranges from the Beatles to Donny Hataway, from blues to jazz to gospel, and there are original pieces of our own.

Alberto Marsico & Sonja Priehn ©JazzAscona – Photo credit Gioele Pozzi

With Organic Brew, however, the hammond organ is the center. There are quite a few compositions by Jack Mc Duff, Jimmy Smith and others, there are some of my own compositions, an arrangement of mine of “A Whiter Shade of Pale” that becomes a jazz ballad, and then other fun stuff, because the organ, as I see it, is the instrument that has the most extreme dynamics possible. You can travel in a split second from devastating volume to a whisper. And the audience feels these emotions. The Hammond is the prince of instruments for these effects, and then with its low frequencies it gives you this groovy feeling that makes you dance. Organic Brew is a tight-knit group of musicians.  There’s Andi Appignani, a fantastic organist, who was my student several times years ago; on drums Luca Guarino, one of the young lions of Turin jazz who plays with Fabrizio Bosso and Dado Moroni and at the young age of 23 is already at stellar levels. Then Daniele Moretto on trumpet, Olmo Antezana on baritone sax and Mirko Roccato on tenor, who has done many arrangements and whom I have known all my life.

The third project, on the other hand, is a gospel choir (Castagnole Community Choir), with whom I will play on June 29 at the Papio Church. The choir was born in the wake of a gospel workshop organized 10 years ago with my wife in a small town on the Piedmont plain where we live. It caught on: 10 people started signing up, then 15, then the next year there were 20 and today the choir has 50 elements, about 30 of them will be in Ascona. There are no professionals, they are all people who live in our area: however, we produced three CDs, we have been to the festival in Dresden, and we have performed in Santa Maria Novella in Florence. It’s proof that a very, very powerful project can grow out of a small thing.