Organs (Musical)

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    Kali Malone Studied Farming. Fate Brought Her to Avant-Garde Music.

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    The 29-year-old musician grew up in Colorado and ended up in Sweden, where she fell in love with the organ. Her latest album, “All Life Long,” is out now.At the close of an organ concert in early February, Kali Malone, performing at Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church in Berlin, did something unusual: She turned off the instrument’s motor while she and Stephen O’Malley of the doom-metal group Sunn 0))) held down the keys. For nearly three minutes, as the air drained from the organ’s 5,000-odd pipes, the pair’s rich chords turned spectral as they faded to silence, wheezing and wavering, like a chorus of sleepy ghosts.The finale was a striking example of the way that Malone, 29, is rethinking the pipe organ for a contemporary context. Born in Colorado but based for more than a decade in Stockholm and Paris, she has emerged as an unusually versatile star of the avant-garde.In a video interview last month, Malone reflected on the path that led to her new album, “All Life Long,” a contemplative 78-minute suite for organ, brass quintet and chamber choir. She thinks of her early work — microtonal software creations that could run for hours — “as my cave man music,” she said. “It’s still exactly what I’m doing now, just my tools have become more sophisticated.”Malone’s fondness for drones hardly makes her a one-note composer. Before her 2019 breakout album, “The Sacrificial Code” — nearly two hours of minimalist, minutely textured organ studies — she was part of a shoegaze trio, conducted an ensemble playing the work of the “deep listening” pioneer Pauline Oliveros, and recorded strings and gongs in a decommissioned nuclear reactor. She flexed her compositional muscles on “Living Torch,” an electroacoustic work created for the Acousmonium, a multichannel setup developed in the 1970s at Groupe de Recherche Musicales, or GRM, in Paris.“There is something both spiritual and almost tactile in the way that she creates music,” François J. Bonnet, director of GRM, said in an email. “She charts her own personal and inspired path — a path influenced by almost nothing, and not the product of cultural trends or zeitgeist.”Malone began blazing her own trail early. Her parents split when she was a child; her father lived in the High Rockies, while Malone moved with her mother to Denver, where she was shuttled to and from choir practice by her grandparents. “I became a teenager when I was 10,” she said. “I grew up so fast, and didn’t have a lot of supervision.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Frederick Swann, Master of the Pipe Organ, Is Dead at 91

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      He drew the best from complex instruments at Riverside Church in Manhattan, at countless recitals and on the “Hour of Power” TV show.Frederick Swann, who in churches on the East Coast and the West played some of the world’s grandest organs, performing classical and religious works on the complex instruments with sensitivity and technical skill, died on Nov. 13 at his home in Palm Desert, Calif. He was 91.The cause was cancer, said Karen McFarlane Holtkamp, who was Mr. Swann’s secretary in the 1960s and ’70s and then his concert manager.Mr. Swann was well known in New York as organist and music director at Riverside Church in Manhattan, where he began playing in the 1950s.In 1982 he reached a much wider audience when he moved to the Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove, Calif., home base of the Rev. Robert H. Schuller, the television evangelist. There he appeared each week on “Hour of Power,” one of the most widely watched religious programs in the country, with a viewership in the millions.Before retiring in 2001, he also served for three years as organist at the First Congregational Church of Los Angeles, which has one of the largest pipe organs in the world. He also played thousands of recitals all over the United States and beyond.That was no easy feat. Large pipe organs require much more than just keyboard dexterity, and each one is different. The acoustics in each church or hall also vary.“Fred was a genius at controlling and maximizing the potential of very large pipe organs,” the organist John Walker, who succeeded Mr. Swann as music director at Riverside, said in a phone interview. “Every organ is absolutely unique. They are custom-made works of art, and Fred was so uniquely skilled at uncovering the timbres in each instrument that he was regularly invited to give inaugural recitals” — that is, the first public performance on a new or rebuilt organ.Mr. Swann at the Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove, Calif., home base of the television evangelist Robert H. Schuller, where he moved in 1982.Al Schaben/Los Angeles Times, via Getty ImagesHe filled that role in 2004 for the formidable organ at the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, a 6,134-pipe instrument designed by Frank Gehry. His program that night included pieces by Bach, Mendelssohn and Josef Rheinberger.“In all three,” Mark Swed wrote in a review in The Los Angeles Times, “the stirring deep pedal tones produced a sonic weight that seemed to anchor the entire building, while the upper diapason notes were clear and warm. The delicate echo effects in the slow movement of Mendelssohn’s sonata spoke magically, as if coming from the garden outdoors.”Ms. Holtkamp noted that, at Riverside and other stops, Mr. Swann was choral director as well as organist; it was not uncommon to see him playing and conducting at the same time. His energy, she said, was boundless. She recalled one Sunday on which he played and directed the morning service at Riverside, played and conducted a portion of the Messiah at the church in the late afternoon, then headed to Lincoln Center to accompany the “Messiah Sing-In.”“How Fred did so much so well in one day still amazes me,” she said by email. “I was totally worn out and I was only the page-turner!”Mr. Walker said that Mr. Swann held four centuries’ worth of music in his head and generally played from memory. He played recitals of all kinds, sometimes as the featured attraction and sometimes accompanying a vocalist, and released numerous albums. Mr. Walker said his playing for religious services was particularly poignant.“In playing a hymn,” he said, “he would be able to express the meaning of an individual word in such a poignant way that I would just immediately tear up.”Frederick Lewis Swann was born on July 30, 1931, in Lewisburg, W.Va. His father, Theodore, was a Methodist minister, and his mother, Mary (Davis) Swann, was a homemaker.Mr. Swann said he pounded on the family piano so much as a toddler that his parents locked it.“Of course,” he told The Diapason, a publication about organs, in 2014, “any 3-year-old can figure out how to get into a piano if he really wants to, and I did.”When he was 5 his parents arranged for him to take piano lessons from the organist at a nearby church. One day he arrived for his lesson and the teacher wasn’t waiting at the piano; he found her at the organ console, practicing.“I was hypnotized watching things popping in and out,” he said. “Lights were flashing, her hands and feet were flying, and I thought, ‘Oh my, that looks like fun.’”His legs weren’t yet long enough to reach the pedals, but eventually she began teaching him the organ — which was lucky, because when he was 10 the organist at his father’s church died, and there was no one else to step in but young Fred.“It must have been simply awful,” he admitted, “but that’s how I got started at age 10, and I’ve just kept on.”He earned a bachelor’s degree in music at Northwestern University in Illinois in 1952 and two years later received a master’s degree in sacred music at Union Theological Seminary in New York. He first played the Riverside organ while still a student. He also played at other Manhattan churches — sometimes, he said, he would provide music at four different churches on the same Sunday.After two years in the Army, he began playing full time at Riverside in 1958. Eventually he became music director. A tribute on the Riverside website noted his role in helping to shape the sound of the church’s organ, a famed instrument.Mr. Swann in 2006 at Riverside Church for a 75th anniversary celebration. He began playing there in the 1950s and served as organist and music director.Nan Melville for The New York Times“Although the organ was originally commissioned under the direction of Virgil Fox, Fred Swann was also on staff at the time of the installation of the organ in the mid-1950s,” it said. “In the succeeding years as director of music he oversaw a complete redesign of the organ console and supervised the organ’s expansion and tonal development. As such, he and those he worked with are responsible for the renowned instrument we hear today.”Mr. Swann acknowledged that his departure from Riverside for the West Coast and the Schuller church in 1982 was viewed with disdain by some of his colleagues.“They thought I had lost my mind because I had this beautiful Gothic cathedral, with a magnificent organ and a professional choir and really a lot of recognition as a church that set the standards in music,” he told The Los Angeles Times in 1998.The Schuller services, in contrast, were known for their showiness and their hodgepodge of musical styles — a service might include a choral number and a country song. Mr. Swann elevated the musical content considerably, but he also broadened his own views.“I feel like we’ve all benefited,” he told The Orange County Register of California in 1987. The challenge of adjusting to a new type of service appealed to him, he said. It also helped that the Crystal Cathedral had an impressive organ.“It goes from barely audible to oh-my-gosh thunderous,” he told The Register in 2013.(The Crystal Cathedral was sold after Mr. Schuller’s ministry went bankrupt and reopened as a Roman Catholic church, Christ Cathedral, in 2019.)Mr. Swann was married briefly to Mina Belle Packer in the 1950s. He is survived by his partner of 64 years, George Dickey.Mr. Swann was active in the American Guild of Organists, serving as its president for six years beginning in 2002, and was a mentor to many younger players, including Mr. Walker.“Most of what I know about how to play a church service I learned from standing next to Fred,” Mr. Walker said.He was also known for his sense of humor, which was often on display in his chats with recital audiences. One time, Mr. Walker said, while giving the inaugural performance on an organ in Dallas, he was vexed by a “cipher” — a pipe that, because of a malfunction, refused to stop playing.“New organs are just like new babies,” he explained to the audience. “They behave just fine until you take them out in public.” More

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      Joey DeFrancesco, Reigning King of the Jazz Organ, Dies at 51

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      A prodigy whose playing had drawn raves since he was a teenager, he helped bring the Hammond B3 back into the jazz lineup.Joey DeFrancesco, who was widely credited with bringing the organ back into vogue in jazz circles in recent decades, has died. He was 51.His wife, Gloria, posted news of his death on Facebook on Friday. She did not say where or when he died or cite the cause.Mr. DeFrancesco had musicianship in his genes: His father, John DeFrancesco, has been playing jazz organ since the 1950s. He was dazzling listeners when he was a teenager.“DeFrancesco — whose infectious, imp-of-the-perverse expressions make him as much fun to watch as listen to — can stride, flatten fifths and string together quotes from Bird, Diz, Monk and Miles with the polished resourcefulness of the eight-year veteran that he is,” Gene Seymour of The Philadelphia Daily News wrote in 1986 after observing the Settlement Jazz Ensemble at the Settlement Music School in Philadelphia, where the young Mr. DeFrancesco was then a student.“And all the while you watch and listen,” Mr. Seymour added, “you find a little voice inside yourself chanting: ‘He’s 15 years old!’”Within two years Mr. DeFrancesco had toured with Miles Davis and opened for Bobby McFerrin and Grover Washington Jr. In 1989, at 17, he played at Duke University with well-known musicians like the trumpeter Clark Terry in a concert that announced the forthcoming Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz, which would open soon after.“As Mr. DeFrancesco played Duke Ellington’s ‘Sophisticated Lady,’ the elder musicians beamed and whispered encouragement,” Jonathan Probber wrote of that show in The New York Times. “The distinct impression was that Mr. DeFrancesco was an example of hopes on the way to realization.”Certainly he was on the way to a formidable career, one that included more than 30 recordings as a bandleader, numerous others as a sideman and countless concerts. Along the way he brought the organ back into fashion in jazz.The Hammond B3 organ became a favorite in jazz circles in the 1950s, with Jimmy Smith, who had numerous hit albums on the Blue Note label, leading the way. But in 1975 the Hammond company stopped making the instrument, and the trend of organ-based trios in jazz clubs faded.Mr. DeFrancesco was a multi-instrumentalist; he also played trumpet, saxophone, piano and synthesizer. But he built his career playing an old-school B3.“I love the synthesizers and play all that stuff, but you can’t beat the sound of the B3,” he told The Associated Press in 1991. “The instrument has a very warm tone. It’s got the contrasts. It just has all those emotions in it. It’s got little bits of every instrument in it. It’s like having a whole orchestra at your fingertips.”Mr. DeFrancesco’s first album, “All of Me,” was released in 1989, and dozens more followed, with his musical interests ranging far and wide. He recorded his own original music. A 2004 album was called “Joey DeFrancesco Plays Sinatra His Way.” His “Never Can Say Goodbye” in 2010 reimagined the music of Michael Jackson. And he collaborated on albums with Van Morrison, the guitarist Danny Gatton and others.The bassist Christian McBride had known Mr. DeFrancesco since they were students at the Settlement School.“Joey DeFrancesco was hands down the most creative and influential organist since Jimmy Smith,” he said in a statement. “In terms of taking the organ to the next level and making it popular again for a younger generation, no one did it like Joey.”Mr. Seymour, who decades ago wrote about the teenage Mr. DeFrancesco in Philadelphia and later became a critic at Newsday, remembered Mr. DeFrancesco in a Facebook post on Friday.“His meteoric rise to fame didn’t surprise me at all,” he wrote. “What did, over time, was how deeply and consummately he mastered the jazz organ tradition at all ends of the musical spectrum, from blues and funk to post-bop and avant incantations. He fulfilled the obligations of his calling by never standing still, never being complacent.”Mr. DeFrancesco in performance at the Newport Jazz Festival in Rhode Island in 2011.Erik Jacobs for The New York TimesMr. DeFrancesco was born on April 10, 1971, in Springfield, near Philadelphia. He didn’t wait long to pick his career path.“When I was 4, my father brought in this monstrous thing, a B3, and he turned it on,” he told The Boston Herald in 1994. “It has a motor and a generator. I started playing it and the sound just moved me. Being a 4-year-old and making up your mind about what you want to do for the rest of your life — I was very fortunate.”He of course credited his father with being his first influence.“You can’t be better off than having a dad who plays the same instrument that you do,” he said. “The music that I heard from the time I was born was jazz.”Happenstance helped propel his career: As a teenager he was performing on a local television show in Philadelphia when Miles Davis was the featured guest. The veteran jazzman was impressed, and Mr. DeFrancesco ended up touring with him for six months.He released a steady stream of albums, five of which received Grammy Award nominations, including, most recently, “In the Key of the Universe” (2019). On his latest album, “More Music” (2021), which features 10 original compositions, he played six different instruments and threw in some vocals well.A full list of survivors was not immediately available.Mr. DeFrancesco was something of a showman, even when he was a sideman. In 2010, for instance, he played with a trio led by the saxophonist David Sanborn. Mr. Sanborn was the headliner, but, as Nate Chinen wrote in The Times of the trio’s gigs, “It’s often as much Mr. DeFrancesco’s show, and sometimes more so.”If he was more flamboyant than some of his contemporaries, that was deliberate, Mr. DeFrancesco told The Buffalo News in 2004.“I think these new players are too damn serious,” he said. “The joy of it, the fun of it, is something that jazz has lost. I mean, we are entertainers, after all. If you don’t look like you’re having fun onstage, how is anyone in the audience supposed to?” More

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      Review: For Franck’s 200th, an Organist Pays Grand Tribute

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      Paul Jacobs has completed his survey of the major solo organ works of César Franck, whose birthday year is passing with scattered observances.It has not been the happiest 200th birthday year for César Franck. “What Happened to One of Classical Music’s Most Popular Pieces?” this newspaper asked a few months ago — the headline to an account of how Franck’s Symphony in D minor, once a standard, largely vanished from concert programs.That symphony has not been widely revived even for this anniversary year, and Franck’s most often heard piece is probably his lush, musing Violin Sonata. But he spent decades at the organ console of Ste.-Clotilde in Paris and as a professor of that instrument at the Paris Conservatory; in his lifetime, he was best known as an organist and a teacher.So it is fitting that among the most prominent 2022 celebrations — indeed, one of the few 2022 celebrations — has come from Paul Jacobs, one of the finest organists and teachers of our day. Jacobs played six of Franck’s pieces at a concert in March, and on Tuesday another six, completing the set of this composer’s 12 major organ works.Both recitals took place at the Church of St. Mary the Virgin in Midtown Manhattan, known informally as “Smoky Mary’s” for what is said to be lingering hints of incense in the air. Its organ, built by the Aeolian-Skinner company, was installed in 1932 and has been lovingly kept since then; it is one of the major instruments of New York, capable of filling a space whose reverberation gives music both clarity and room to breathe.Paul Jacobs, one of the finest organists and teachers of our day.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesIn March, Jacobs played the three pieces Franck wrote in the late 1870s, and the three sprawling, pensive chorales that were the great product of 1890, the year he died. The 75-minute, intermissionless program on Tuesday pushed further back in time, to the “Six Pièces pour Grand Orgue” that were written soon after Franck took up his position at Ste.-Clotilde, in 1858, and published in 1868.These are Romantic outpourings, their structures grand, if improvisatory in feel. Yet Jacobs kept them from turning turgid — his tempos flowing while conveying the weight and depth of the music. He began the “Fantaisie” with mysterious, almost meterless delicacy, like the prelude to “Parsifal”; in the “Pastorale,” his palette extended to spicy burnt umber and milky pale blue, mellow oboe and sweetly piercing flute.Jacobs’s textures were also beautifully varied in the “Prière,” the trumpet mellowed by the vast space without losing its focus; the “Prélude, Fugue et Variation” was a wistful nocturne, sensitively controlled and never overblown. The “Final” moved from roaring lows to shimmering highs, its dotted-rhythm motif bounding before its pile-on conclusion.Jacobs played the “Final” third. His even apter finale to the concert was the “Grand Pièce Symphonique,” which lasts nearly half an hour and influenced a generation of large-scale solo organ works. Here it was clear in its hovering veils of sound, its quietly lyrical serenity and its toccata flurries, before a steady, triumphal ending.If Franck is to have such scattered tributes this year, at least Jacobs has done him justice.Paul JacobsPerformed on Tuesday at the Church of St. Mary the Virgin, Manhattan. More

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      Simon Preston, Acclaimed Organist and Conductor, Dies at 83

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      A force in the world of choral music, he was considered one of the most important English church musicians of his generation.Simon Preston, an organist, conductor and composer who was an instrumentalist of consummate, intelligent virtuosity and a force in the early-music movement, died on May 13. He was 83.Westminster Abbey, where Mr. Preston served as organist and director of the choir from 1981 to 1987, announced the death. The announcement did not say where he died or cite a cause.Mr. Preston, who was admired as one of the most important English church musicians of his generation, was an archetypal product of a choral tradition that, with unstinting energy and an insatiable demand for high standards, he reinvigorated — and eventually moved beyond. His solo career took him to organ lofts across the world, and he recorded prolifically, including with the conductors Yehudi Menuhin in Handel, Seiji Ozawa in Poulenc and James Levine in Saint-Saëns.He took to the organ as if born for it. Determined to spend his life playing the instrument even as a child, he joined the hallowed choir of King’s College, Cambridge, at age 11 and became its organ scholar as an undergraduate in 1958. When the dashing and dynamic Mr. Preston took his first post at Westminster Abbey, in 1962, he was said to be the youngest organist at the royal church since Henry Purcell, three centuries earlier.After a brief stint covering for Peter Hurford as master of the music at St. Albans Cathedral in 1968, Mr. Preston took charge of the choir at the Cathedral of Christ Church College, Oxford, in 1970; he also lectured at the university. He brought out a fervent, firm tone and an impressive agility in the Christ Church singers, just as he did in those he returned to at Westminster Abbey, where he directed the music for the wedding of Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson in 1986.Enjoying the time and concentration that studio conditions demanded, he made each group in turn a lively presence on record in the 1970s and ’80s, setting down acclaimed accounts — often with the period instrument specialists of the English Concert and the Academy of Ancient Music — of composers from Haydn back to Handel and Purcell, and beyond to Lassus and Palestrina.The Musical Times commented in 1988 that “his work with the choirs of Christ Church, Oxford, and Westminster Abbey set standards of excellence which are regarded as points of reference.”But Mr. Preston, who maintained a vigorous solo schedule throughout that period, came to chafe at the tedious routine of playing and conducting regular services. He decided to leave the abbey and to concentrate on his freelance career, one that came to include more than a decade spent working with the Deutsche Grammophon label on the organ works of Bach, in whose more grandly scaled compositions he excelled.“It was hard to imagine that anyone could have displayed the mighty Skinner instrument of St. Bartholomew’s Church, said to be the largest pipe organ in New York, more fully and effectively,” critic James R. Oestreich of The New York Times wrote in reviewing one of Mr. Preston’s many recitals in the city in 1992.“His wonderfully colorful registrations,” Mr. Oestreich continued, “presented in wildly imaginative juxtapositions, made it seem on one hand as if he were intimately familiar with this instrument, but on the other as if he were sharing fresh and spontaneous discoveries of its rich possibilities with the audience.”Simon John Preston was born on Aug. 4, 1938, in Bournemouth, a town on the south coast of England. His inspiration to take up the organ was George Thalben-Ball, whom he heard when he was 5 on a shellac record of Wagner’s “The Ride of the Valkyries.”“I suppose you could say I came from a church family,” Mr. Preston, who started studying piano when he was old enough to read the psalter, and who later more than dabbled at the harpsichord, said in an interview with The Musical Times. “My uncle played the organ at the local church, my parents were both worshipers there, and my aunt taught in the local church school. We had a harmonium at home, and I used to fiddle around on that.”While singing at King’s College, he trained under the organ scholar Hugh McLean, into whose prestigious former post he would move after studies at the Royal Academy of Music. He returned to King’s at an auspicious moment; the new organist and director of music, David Willcocks, was to markedly raise the stature of a choir now widely known for its Christmas broadcasts. Mr. Preston contributed an arrangement of the carol “I Saw Three Ships” that remains in festive use, at King’s and elsewhere.“Already something individual is to be heard in the King’s recordings made at that time,” Gramophone magazine wrote in a profile in 1967, noting “the glow of Preston’s accompaniments to the choral works by Orlando Gibbons and in the Advent Carol Festival of 1961.”When Mr. Preston graduated to Westminster Abbey, he became little short of a phenomenon; he drew audiences unlike any of his elder colleagues, toured the United States and Canada in 1965, and made records for the Argo label that were characteristically both fastidious in their preparation and flamboyant in their execution.“From any point of view it would be hard to find fault,” The Times of London wrote in 1965 of a release of Reubke and Reger. “Technical difficulties,” the review continued, “are smoothly dealt with, leaving the organist-listener in a glow of vicarious triumph.”Mr. Preston was one of the more eager advocates of Messiaen in Britain, and he took Messiaen’s style as his model in his own early choral and instrumental compositions, including the solo “Alleluyas,” written in 1965.Later, and in a more personal language that reflected deeper experience, he wrote a “Toccata” that toys with the legacy of Bach’s Toccata in D minor — arguably the most famous organ work of all, yet one, as he wrote in the score, that “repays a certain amount of scrutiny.” He also composed and performed music for the soundtrack of the 1984 film “Amadeus.”Mr. Preston married Elizabeth Hays in 2012. She survives him. Further information on survivors was not immediately available.The radio host Bruce Duffie asked Mr. Preston, in a 1990 interview, if the itinerant life of an organ soloist was fun. It was, he said.“You suddenly find an instrument which is just the one that you want to play very much indeed. Even when it’s not the greatest instrument, there’s always something to be got from it; some new twists, some new sounds somewhere. Actually trying to work the very best out of a rather recalcitrant instrument is still fun.”“It’s lonely, though,” he continued. “You’re on your own. You’re a solo performer. There’s nothing much around. You can be stuck in some cold cheerless church, or overheated cheerless church, and it can be grim from that point of view.“But no, I think it’s fun.” More

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      A ‘High Priestess of Satanic Art’? This Organist Can Only Laugh.

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      For more than a decade, Anna von Hausswolff has been bringing the sound of pipe organs to rock fans. But Roman Catholic extremists have tried to stop her playing shows in churches.When Anna von Hausswolff, an acclaimed Swedish songwriter and organist, first heard that a conservative Roman Catholic website was calling her a satanist and demanding a concert boycott, she and her team laughed it off.“We thought it was hilarious,” von Hausswolff, 35, recalled in a recent interview. “The whole day we were laughing,”The site, Riposte Catholique, was firing its readers up ahead of a concert of von Hausswolff’s epic pipe organ music at a church in Nantes, a city in the west of France. Some of her fans were goths, the site said, and her songs were “more a black Mass than music for a church.” A music blogger had called her “the high priestess” of “satanic harmonies,” the site noted, and conservative Roman Catholic groups noticed that, on the track “Pills,” she sings, “I made love with the devil.”“We said, ‘This is such a great P.R. campaign,’” Von Hausswolff said. “I mean, ‘the High Priestess of satanic art.’ Wow!”But as soon as she arrived at the church in Nantes, the joking stopped. Outside were about 30 young men, most wearing black jackets and hoodies, protesting the show, Von Hausswolff said. The concert’s promoter told her that some men had just broken into the venue, trying to find her.Soon, there were 100 people blocking the church’s entrance. Von Hausswolff sat in the richly painted church, staring up at the organ that she’d hoped to play, listening to protesters chanting and banging on the doors outside as her fans shouted back at them.“There was a primal part of me that told me I was not safe,” she said. “I wanted to get out.” She canceled the show.In recent years, disagreements between conservatives and liberals over issues like gay marriage and abortion have become increasingly heated in parts of Europe. Von Hausswolff’s experience is an example of another tension point in the continent’s culture wars: In some countries, a small minority of Roman Catholics regularly protests art it considers blasphemous.Initially, when the campaign against her was just online, Anna von Hausswolff laughed off the accusations of Satanism. Ines Sebalj for The New York TimesCéline Béraud, an academic who studies the sociology of catholicism in France, said in a telephone interview that extremists had staged protests against artworks and plays in the country for the past 20 years. “It comes from a well organized minority who’re very good at getting attention in the media,” Béraud said.One of their regular targets is Hellfest, a rock music festival held every year close to Nantes. In 2015, a group of protesters broke into the site and set fire to some of the festival’s stage sets. Since then, protesters have regularly doused the festival site’s fields with holy water. Hellfest’s communications manager, Eric Perrin, said in an email that staff members recently found 50 gold pendants depicting the Virgin Mary scattered around the site. Since playing a real pipe organ in concert almost always means playing in church, von Hausswolff’s tour problems didn’t end when she left Nantes — even though some French bishops had issued statements of support. In Paris, she was scheduled to play the grand organ at St.-Eustache, a church widely considered a jewel of the French Renaissance, but after its priest was deluged with complaints, she instead performed a secret show at a Protestant church near the Arc de Triomphe.In December, protestors gathered outside a von Hausswolff concert in Brussels. “That was fine,” Von Hausswolff said. “They weren’t screaming or banging on doors.”Laurie Dieffembacq/Belga, via Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesLater, in Brussels, about 100 people protested outside her show at a Dominican church, taking a more peaceful approach than their French counterparts and moving away from its doors when asked by police. At Nijmegen, the Netherlands, just two protesters appeared, standing quietly outside while holding signs with the message “Satan is not welcome.”Von Hausswolff is not someone you would expect to cause such a stir. She grew up in Gothenburg, Sweden, and said her childhood was “very creative.” (Her father, Carl Michael von Hausswolff, is a composer and performance artist.)As a teenager, she sang in a church choir, and dreamed of becoming a musician, but ended up training as an architect. Her music career only took off in 2009 when, age 23, she released a demo of piano songs called “Singing from the Grave” that quickly found a fan base in Sweden thanks to her soaring vocals. She was frequently compared to the English pop star Kate Bush.After an organ builder told her she could make beautiful pipe organ music, she gave it a go, she recalled, trying out the organ in Gothenburg’s vast Annedal Church. “When I reached the lowest note, I couldn’t believe my ears,” Von Hausswolff said. “I felt it through my whole body.”She’s since explored what the instrument can do across five albums, sometimes pairing it with a rock band and at other times performing solo. Her most recent, released this month, is a live album recorded at the Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland.Hans Davidsson, an organist who helps von Hausswolff probe the instrument’s capabilities, said that she “explores the organ with open ears, eyes and senses,” and had developed her “own musical language.” Her music was inspiring to many classical organists like him, he added. “It’s fortunate for us that she chose the organ,” he said.In the interview, von Hausswolff, who was wearing Christmas leggings covered in cartoon reindeer in Santa hats, denied she was a satanist. Von Hausswolff declined to say what her 2009 track “Pills” — in which she sings of satanic lovemaking — was about, since songs should be left open to interpretation, she said. But, she added, “If you’re asking me if I literally had sex with the devil, the answer is, ‘No.’”“I’m there to present my pipe organ art so that it hopefully can invoke deeper thought in people,” Von Hausswolff said of her work.Ines Sebalj for The New York TimesAs much as she was happy to joke about the accusations, the incidents last month had left a mark. She still felt scared by the French and Belgian protests, she said, and was also worried that churches might think twice about letting her play their organs, so as to avoid complaints.“I’m not a good Christian and never will be,” said von Hausswolff, adding that she saw herself as agnostic. “But I’m there to present my pipe organ art, so that it hopefully can invoke deeper thought in people.”She was already planning more church tours, she said. As long as she was welcome, she added, “I will go there, and I will play my music.” More

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      5 Minutes That Will Make You Love the Organ

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      Listen to the biggest, loudest, most extravagant (yet incredibly subtle) instrument of them all.In the past we’ve chosen the five minutes or so we would play to make our friends fall in love with classical music, piano, opera, cello, Mozart, 21st-century composers, violin, Baroque music, sopranos, Beethoven, flute, string quartets, tenors, Brahms, choral music, percussion, symphonies, Stravinsky, trumpet, Maria Callas and Bach.Now we want to convince those curious friends to love the grandeur and colors of the organ — a full orchestra in a single instrument. We hope you find lots here to discover and enjoy; leave your favorites in the comments.◆ ◆ ◆James McVinnie, organistIf I had a time machine, I would go back to 1740 to hear Johann Sebastian Bach play the organ in Leipzig, Germany. Bach is the ultimate composer for this extraordinary, timeless instrument. Much of his organ music is intense, revealing its multilayered, life-affirming majesty slowly, through repeated listening. The opening to his 29th cantata, however, leaps and bounds with immediate joy. There is something visceral about hearing this music played live, on a great organ, in a vast cathedral space: The building shakes, the air shimmers and the music is as much felt as heard.Bach’s “Wir danken dir, Gott”Robert Quinney (Hyperion)◆ ◆ ◆Joy-Leilani Garbutt, organist and Boulanger Initiative co-founderThis piece stops me in my tracks every time I hear it, conjuring the phrases “tour de force” and “pièce de résistance.” In an incredible display of badassery, Demessieux unleashes the full spectrum of the organ’s capabilities, with all its sounds, timbres, colors and contrasts. Too often people associate this instrument with dirges or spooky music; this piece is energetic and exuberant.The middle section is like a slow jazz waltz sound bath, filled with luscious chords and featuring an inverted texture that places the solo in the pedals and the bass line on the keyboards. As a performer, it’s always a great adventure to tackle music written by a virtuoso composer to showcase her own instrument. Demessieux knows exactly what the organ can do, and she uses all of it.Jeanne Demessieux’s “Te Deum”Hampus Lindwall (Ligia)◆ ◆ ◆Zachary Woolfe, Times classical music editorIt hardly gets grander than Saint-Saëns’s Third Symphony, which he titled “with organ.” And yet, with the right musicians, this gigantic Romantic wedding cake of a piece is shining elegance, not overkill. After its first C-major blast in the finale, the organ is woven into the orchestra so lovingly that it never seems to be used for mere effect; the instrument is treated like a jewel, to be placed in one of the repertory’s most sumptuous, stirring settings. A delightful bonus in this finely detailed recording: a father-and-son pair of eminences as organist and conductor.Saint-Saëns’s Third SymphonyDaniel Roth; Les Siècles; François-Xavier Roth, conductor (Harmonia Mundi)◆ ◆ ◆Sarah Kirkland Snider, composerOne remarkable thing about the organ is its ability to generate acoustic sounds that seem electronic. The Scottish composer Claire M. Singer explores this to rapturous effect in “The Molendinar,” a slowly morphing, 25-minute journey that intricately builds beautiful, bending overtones over a simple ground bass through her manipulation of the organ’s mechanical stop action. The Molendinar is a hidden watercourse above which the city of Glasgow was founded in the sixth century, but the music’s grand, glacial build, and ghostly evanescence, remind me of the Breton legend of Ys, its mythological cathedral rising and then sinking back into the ocean.Claire M. Singer’s “The Molendinar”Claire M. Singer◆ ◆ ◆Cameron Carpenter, organistIf I’m introducing someone, I can only submit my most recent recording, since it is played on an instrument I designed whose very point is to demonstrate the possibilities of the modern organ. The transition of the instrument to the digital realm gives us a glimpse of the part of it that transcends moving parts. In pairing Bach’s “Goldberg” Variations with Howard Hanson‘s 1930 Symphony No. 2, “Romantic,” I wanted to contrast two masterpieces from outside the organ repertoire. I didn’t intrude on any organ works in which others are better versed, and the instrument’s clarity and color helps us to understand these well-loved pieces anew.Howard Hanson’s “Romantic” SymphonyCameron Carpenter (Decca Gold)◆ ◆ ◆David Allen, Times writerAlthough César Franck wrote relatively few works for the organ, he was still arguably the greatest composer for the instrument since Bach, and it was in Bach’s shadow that he composed three chorales in 1890, the year he died. What Franck called a chorale, though, bears little resemblance to Bach’s settings of hymn tunes; the three are vast, 15-minute ruminations on belief, none more spiritual than the second, a passacaglia that hypnotically winds its way to what the ear thinks is going to be an imposing declaration of faith, before it falls away to a quieter, more personal hope.Franck’s Chorale No. 2 in B minorJeanne Demessieux (Eloquence)◆ ◆ ◆Paul Jacobs, organistBeethoven considered organists “the greatest of all virtuosi.” But if making music with all four limbs isn’t hard enough, Lou Harrison also expects the soloist in his Concerto for Organ and Percussion to play clamorous clusters of keys with felt padded slabs — to match a full battery of percussion that includes Chinese crash cymbals, oxygen tank bells and gongs galore. While I’ve always prized the organ’s uncanny ability to arouse our numinous instincts, sometimes we just want to let our hair down. The irrepressible joy of the final movement will wake the dead and make them dance.Lou Harrison’s Concerto for Organ with Percussion OrchestraPaul Jacobs; San Francisco Symphony, Michael Tilson Thomas, conductor (SFS Media)◆ ◆ ◆Anthony Tommasini, Times chief classical music criticThe young Aaron Copland wrote his Symphony for Organ and Orchestra at the behest of his teacher, Nadia Boulanger, who played the solo part at the premiere, in 1925. Copland’s friend and colleague Virgil Thomson later described the symphony as “the voice of America in our generation.” He was right. While looking back at the European symphonic heritage, Copland’s ambitious piece is fresh, direct, unsentimental and sassy in a way that seems somehow American, especially the feisty, unabashedly dissonant finale. And I love the ruminative opening Andante, which glows and sighs in this live recording.Copland’s Organ SymphonyPaul Jacobs; San Francisco Symphony, Michael Tilson Thomas, conductor (SFS Media)◆ ◆ ◆Javier C. Hernández, Times classical music and dance reporterHandel is best known for his operas and oratorios. But his organ concertos contain some of his most lively and playful music. A gifted virtuoso on the instrument, he performed several of these pieces as entertainment for audiences between acts of his oratorios. The Organ Concerto in F, which premiered in 1739, goes by the nickname “The Cuckoo and the Nightingale” for its chirpy motifs. Marie-Claire Alain plays with precision and zeal, gliding through the many improvisatory sections.Handel’s Organ Concerto No. 13Marie-Claire Alain; Orchestra de Chambre Jean-François Paillard (Erato)◆ ◆ ◆Nico Muhly, composerThe organ in church can be like a piece of beautiful architecture, or a wonderful sermon: It is sometimes taken for granted. And there is a subtle art to playing with a choir; the organist must wrestle with the acoustics of the space to make sure everything aligns, as the player is oftentimes quite far from the singers, and the pipes can be practically miles away.One beautiful challenge is the “Jubilate” from Herbert Howells’s morning service for the choir of King’s College, Cambridge, and the extraordinary and specific acoustics of the chapel there. Even when the organ is under the choir, Howells is masterly at doubling the voices and weaving in and out of them, foretelling little themes or echoing them after. The acoustics of the space turn the simple counterpoint into something intentionally blurry but somehow precise, like a house at night lit from within but seen from outside, with shapes flickering in and out of view.The beginning of the piece starts with the organ in its simplest incarnation, just holding an E-flat minor chord. In the last phrase, on the text “world without end, amen,” the choir sings in unison, and the organ, here the primary voice, unspools a long melody, crabwise but ultimately pointing downward toward a resolution in E-flat major.Herbert Howells’s “Jubilate”Peter Barley; King’s College Choir; Stephen Cleobury, conductor (Argo)◆ ◆ ◆Joshua Barone, Times editorYou can’t help but appreciate the too-muchness of the organ. Its extremity goes both ways: It can whisper, or shake the ground you stand on with the awe-inspiring sound of a full-voiced choir. Both ends of the spectrum coexist in Samuel Barber’s 1960 “Toccata Festiva.” About two-thirds into the piece, after an opening of Romantic excess and concerto-like flair, comes a cadenza that rises from foreboding depths to episodes that are by turns agile, luminous and borderline outrageous — but arriving at a mysterious peace. When the orchestra returns in a crowded dash to the ending, all of its might is necessary to meet the grandeur of what may be our most extravagant instrument.Barber’s “Toccata Festiva”Paul Jacobs; Lucerne Symphony Orchestra; James Gaffigan, conductor (Harmonia Mundi)◆ ◆ ◆Anna Lapwood, organistIt’s hard not to be impressed by the sheer power a pipe organ can produce, but it is also an instrument with an amazing capacity for beauty and sensitivity, characteristics that are often overlooked when talking about it. We hear this more subtle side in Robilliard’s transcription of Fauré’s “Sicilienne,” performed here by Thomas Ospital in the Church of St. Eustache in Paris. It’s in this kind of music that the building becomes integral to the success of a performance; as we hear the individual flute stops dancing around the space, the acoustic bloom becomes an architectural sustaining pedal.Fauré’s “Sicilienne”Thomas Ospital◆ ◆ ◆Seth Colter Walls, Times writerWhen the Los Angeles Philharmonic wanted to commission organ music from Terry Riley, they let him hang out all night playing on Hurricane Mama, the potent pipe instrument inside Walt Disney Concert Hall. Some of the material Riley improvised there made its way into his 2013 concerto “At the Royal Majestic.” One of his grandest late-career works, it’s punchy, mystical and gorgeous. (It’s also a reminder that his artistic development did not stop with the early Minimalist touchstone “In C.”)The close of the first movement — called “Negro Hall,” after a drawing by the fin-de-siècle Swiss artist Adolf Wölfli — occasionally seesaws between sugar-sweet orchestral motifs and gloomier exhalations from the organ. Riley presents such contrasts not with postmodern irony, but with tangible, genuine delight. Even after a climactic turn toward frenzied rhythmic patterns, his joyous sensibility is always perceptible, and the final chords are exhilarating.Terry Riley’s “At the Royal Majestic”Todd Wilson; Nashville Symphony; Giancarlo Guerrero, conductor (Naxos)◆ ◆ ◆Olivier Latry, an organist at Notre-DameApril 15, 2019: The whole world was horrified to discover the images of Notre-Dame on fire. A few weeks earlier, I was in the cathedral recording this “Little” Fugue in G minor for an album called “Bach to the Future.”“Little” — but it is nevertheless great Bach! In a few minutes, the cantor of Leipzig tells us such a story. I love the fragility that shines throughout this work, a fragility that brings us back to our human condition in front of current events: the fire of Notre-Dame, the health situation, climate change. May this music make us aware of our determining role in humanity.Bach’s Fugue in G minor, BWV 578Olivier Latry (La Prima Volta)◆ ◆ ◆ More

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      She Was an Organist for the Ages

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      Jeanne Demessieux, born 100 years ago, was an astonishing player and a virtuosic composer.Few musicians have faced a debut more intense than did the organist Jeanne Demessieux. For years before her first concert — one of six she gave at the Salle Pleyel in Paris early in 1946 — her teacher Marcel Dupré had stoked rumors of her outlandish talent.“Jeanne Demessieux is the greatest organist of all generations,” Dupré, then practically the god of the French organ world, had declared in 1944. She would be, he predicted, “one of the greatest glories of France.”There was tremendous pressure, then, on this shy, workaholic, perfectionist prodigy, who had lived under what Dupré said was his “artistic protection” since 1936 — winning first prize in his class at the Paris Conservatory in 1941 and remaining his student and assistant after that.Pressure, too, from the imposing program of the first of her “six historic recitals,” as the publicity announced them: the Bach C Minor Passacaglia; a Franck chorale; a Dupré prelude and fugue; the premiere of her own, impossibly challenging Six Études; and a symphony in four movements — one she improvised.Yet Demessieux, who was born in Montpellier, France, in 1921 and whose centenary is being celebrated with performances of her complete organ works at St. Thomas Church in Manhattan Nov. 6, 13 and 20, exceeded expectations. Dupré waxed “of a phenomenon equal to the youth of Bach or Mozart.” Maurice Duruflé, then finishing his Requiem, declared that “next to Jeanne Demessieux, the rest of us play the pedals like elephants.” Le Figaro wrote that she was a fairy tale that could be believed in, for she had been “irresistible absolute perfection.”“She certainly earned her place,” Stephen Tharp, the organist for the St. Thomas concerts, who released a recording of Demessieux’s complete organ compositions in 2008, said in an interview. “You like her interpretations, you don’t like her interpretations — but the amount of skill, focus, intelligence it took to play programs of that stature at the Salle Pleyel, in her 20s, and to compose, to improvise, in the way and at the level that she could, was really without equal.”Demessieux became the first female organist to sign a record deal, setting down a fleet run through Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor for Decca in 1947, and paving the way for women such as Marie-Claire Alain and Gillian Weir. Tours began, taking her around Europe and on to the United States, where the critic Virgil Thomson, praising her “taste, intelligence and technical skill of the highest order” in 1953, would think of “masters” like Charles-Marie Widor, Louis Vierne and Olivier Messiaen as the only possible equals of this “extraordinary musician and virtuoso.”Demessieux seemed destined to take a top liturgical position, at Dupré’s St.-Sulpice or even at Notre-Dame. But shortly after her debut, Dupré, who appears to have been fed unfounded rumors that Demessieux had been disloyal, cut off contact with his pupil and resolved to sabotage her career.Instead, Demessieux stayed with her family’s parish church, where she had been organist since she was 12, until she succeeded Camille Saint-Saëns and Gabriel Fauré as titulaire, or chief organist, at the church of the Madeleine in 1962. She prospered at a Cavaillé-Coll instrument with which she had a rare bond, having recorded a transcendent Franck cycle on it in 1959, the high point of an invaluable eight-disc set from Eloquence that came out earlier this year, amply documented with notes by the organist D’Arcy Trinkwon.Although Demessieux was a star in the 1940s and ’50s, when she kept up a punishing concert schedule alongside her liturgical work and her teaching in Liège, Belgium, her status faltered after her death from cancer in 1968, at just 47. The Eloquence set gives her Decca tapes their first release on a major label in the CD era.Part of the reason for Demessieux’s ebbing fortunes can be traced to the rise of neoclassical and period performance practices, which made her impulsive, lyrical, heartfelt style — one that brought a singular lightness of touch to a grand symphonic tradition — seem outdated, especially in the Bach and Handel with which she often opened her concerts.Part of the reason, too, was the difficulty of her compositions, some of which were unpublished until recently and were promoted mostly by students like Pierre Labric. Although her whirling “Te Deum” from 1958, inspired by the Aeolian-Skinner organ at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York, has had sustained success, works like her études, her “Triptyque” and her late Prelude and Fugue pushed the frontiers of the possible, and they remain “ferociously hard” even now, Tharp said — “things she really wrote for herself.”While Demessieux sometimes wrote with moving simplicity, as in chorale preludes like “Rorate coeli” and “Hosanna filio David” that speak to the devotional quality of her Catholic faith, many of her pieces have an angst to them, a gnarled bleakness, though they stop far short of atonality.“She uses a voice that I don’t think women were often allowed to use in other ways, and she puts it all into her music,” the organist Joy-Leilani Garbutt said in an interview.Predictably, Demessieux faced sexist stereotypes throughout her career. There were critics who wrote ill of the high heels that were an intrinsic part of her pedal technique, or that she was “too young and attractive to be an organist of the first rank,” as The Boston Globe put it in 1953. Some churches still barred women from their organ lofts, not least Westminster Abbey, which had to give her special dispensation to perform in 1947. Perhaps most scurrilous was the slur that she was merely the creation of Dupré, not an artist in her own right.But Garbutt, a scholar and a founder of the Boulanger Initiative, which advocates women composers, has found in her research that prejudices came with a twist in this case. Demessieux emerged from a tradition in which women organists could and did shine, though she might well have dazzled brightest of all.“She wasn’t the only woman international virtuoso, she wasn’t the only woman composer for the organ, and she wasn’t the only woman professor of organ, or the only woman to hold a major church position,” Garbutt said, mentioning Joséphine Boulay, the earliest woman to win first prize in organ at the Paris Conservatory, in 1888; Renée Nazin, a student of Vierne’s who did three world tours in the 1930s; and Rolande Falcinelli, who succeeded Dupré as professor at the Conservatory in 1955.“But I think Demessieux may have been the only woman to do all of those things in her lifetime,” Garbutt said.This was an era when women had greater opportunities to succeed, Garbutt argues, suggesting that they found grudging acceptance when jobs needed filling after so many men had died in the world wars. The spatial configurations of French churches played a role, too, with organists seated high in the gallery, unseen during Mass. While there were Parisian priests who tolerated or even supported women, others banned them, a rule that some artists used their invisibility while performing to flout. Henriette Puig-Roget, for instance, simply submitted her name as Monsieur Roget, cross-dressed, and substituted for Charles Tournemire at Ste.-Clotilde.Even so, the opportunities were fleeting. “The invisibility was a privilege or a tool that could be used to create their music,” Garbutt said, “but on the flip side it made their work disappear almost as soon as it had been created.” Women have since occupied major organ posts — Sophie-Véronique Cauchefer-Choplin, for instance, has shared Dupré’s old position at St.-Sulpice with Daniel Roth since 1985 — but equal representation remains a distant ideal.In achieving that ideal, though, it may well be helpful to have historical material like the new Demessieux set. It is a revelation, from the incandescence of her Toccata from Widor’s Fifth Symphony to the jazzy angularity of Jean Berveiller’s “Mouvement”; the reverence of her Bach chorale preludes to the fury of her Liszt. The playing invites superlatives, even as it defies the complexity and artificiality of the organ to such an extent that it allows a rare focus on the music itself.“Who is the greatest organist of the 20th century?” Tharp said. “I really think it’s fair to say she’s a contender.” More

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      Lonnie Smith, Soulful Jazz Organist, Is Dead at 79

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      Adept at blending the sophistication of jazz with the earthy appeal of rhythm and blues, he was later widely sampled by hip-hop artists.Lonnie Smith, a master of the Hammond B3 organ and a leading exponent of the infectiously rhythmic genre known as soul jazz, died on Tuesday at his home in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. He was 79.His manager and partner, Holly Case, said the cause was pulmonary fibrosis.Mr. Smith, who began billing himself as Dr. Lonnie Smith in the mid-1970s, could draw an audience’s attention with his appearance alone: He had a long white beard and always wore a colorful turban. (The turbans apparently had no specific religious significance, and he did not have an advanced degree in anything and never explained why he had adopted the honorific “Dr.”) His playing was every bit as striking.He began his career at a time when organists like Jimmy Smith and Jack McDuff were blending the sophistication of jazz with the earthy appeal of rhythm and blues. Mr. Smith was very much in that tradition, but his playing could also display an ethereal quality that was all his own. His music later reached new generations of fans when it was widely sampled by hip-hop artists.Reviewing a 2015 performance at the Jazz Standard in New York, Ben Ratliff of The New York Times praised Mr. Smith’s sense of dynamics. “When he is quiet, he is very quiet,” Mr. Ratliff wrote. “During a gospelish song with the singer Alicia Olatuja, he started a solo passage at a level that almost couldn’t be heard and stayed there for quite a while, unspooling jagged, alert phrases that you had to strain to listen to: an easy trick but a powerful one.”Lonnie Smith was born on July 3, 1942, in Lackawanna, N.Y., a suburb of Buffalo, and raised by his mother, Beulah Mae Early, and his stepfather, Charles Smith. As a teenager he sang in vocal groups and played trumpet and other instruments before a store owner’s generosity spurred his lifelong love affair with the organ.As he recalled in interviews, he spent a lot of time in a Buffalo music store, mostly just looking. One day he told the owner, Art Kubera (whom he would later call “my angel”), that he was sure he could make a living in music if he had an instrument. Mr. Kubera took him to the back of the store, showed him a Hammond B3 organ and told him that he could have it for nothing if he was able to get it out of the store. He did, he taught himself to play it, and his career began.Mr. Smith was soon working regularly at the Pine Grill in Buffalo. Mr. McDuff was an early influence, and when the guitarist George Benson left Mr. McDuff’s combo to form his own group, he hired Mr. Smith.The Benson quartet had an inauspicious beginning at a bar in the Bronx, where, Mr. Benson wrote in his autobiography, “Benson” (2014), “Lonnie and I played behind a revolving cast of go-go dancers.” After moving to a jazz club in Harlem, the Benson quartet began building a following.Mr. Smith’s first album as a leader was released by Columbia Records in 1967.Both Mr. Benson and Mr. Smith signed with Columbia Records. Mr. Smith’s first album as a leader, “Finger-Lickin’ Good,” which featured Mr. Benson on guitar, was released in 1967, but his tenure with Columbia was brief. The next year he moved to Blue Note, which had already used him on the alto saxophonist Lou Donaldson’s hit album “Alligator Boogaloo.”Blue Note, which had helped launch the organ-jazz boom by signing Jimmy Smith a decade earlier, was a natural home for Mr. Smith. But after releasing four well-received albums on the label, beginning with “Think!” (1968) and ending with “Drives” (1970), he moved on.He recorded for various labels throughout the 1970s, but by the end of the decade his brand of jazz was falling out of favor and he was growing tired of the music business. He stopped recording and maintained a low profile, performing only occasionally and sometimes under an assumed name.He ended his studio hiatus in 1993 with “Afro Blue,” a tribute to John Coltrane with John Abercrombie on guitar and Marvin Smith on drums, released on the MusicMasters label. (The same trio would later release two Jimi Hendrix tribute albums, “Foxy Lady” in 1994 and “Purple Haze”in 1995.) By that time Mr. Smith’s influence had grown in ways he had never anticipated: His 1970 cover of the Blood, Sweat & Tears hit “Spinning Wheel” had been sampled by A Tribe Called Quest, the first of many hip-hop acts that would find inspiration in his catalog.Mr. Smith began performing again, both with his own groups and with Mr. Donaldson, and eventually returned to Blue Note; his first album for the label in more than 40 years, “Evolution,” was released in 2016. His most recent album, “Breathe,” released this year, included a surprising guest appearance by the punk-rock pioneer Iggy Pop on two tracks, the vintage R&B ballad “Why Can’t We Live Together” and Donovan’s “Sunshine Superman.”In addition to Ms. Case, Mr. Smith is survived by four daughters, Lani Chambers, Chandra Thomas, Charisse Partridge and Vonnie Smith, and several grandchildren.In 2017 the National Endowment for the Arts named him a Jazz Master, the country’s highest official honor for a jazz musician.“A lot of musicians get into music because they want to be rich, famous or all of the above,” Mr. Smith said in a 2012 interview. “You are already rich once you sit down and learn to play. That’s richness in itself.”Alex Traub contributed reporting. More