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NEWS
Keyboard Magazine Interview
February 2002
5 Questions with Moe Denham
Moe Denham has been a fixture on the Nashville scene for years.
At one gig or another the organist has crossed paths and traded
licks with some of the biggest names in music.
His debut release, Little Blue Volkswagon, finds him cooking
up a steaming pot of the jazz and blues gumbo he calls "blazz"
with guitarist Mike Howard and drummer Dave Cook. Joey DeFrancesco
produced and guests on the title cut.
1. Tell us about the spark that first made you want to play
music.
A long, long time ago when I was a kid, my mother was a classical
music fanatic and a pianist. She liked jazz and Latin music a lot
too. She had three or four Tito Puente records. I loved that rhythm.
My mom's record collection was a big influence.My sister had all
the Les Paul and Mary Ford records. I was fascinated by Les Paul's
echo effect and all those other crazy effects he invented. From
that I got the desire to make my instrument sound different than
just a stock instrument.
So I bought my first B-3 in 1965 and a couple years later I found
an Echoplex. I figured out a way to wire it into the B-3. I can
even remember going into a Hammond Organ store and telling one of
the techs what I had done, and he looked right at me and said, "Well,
that's impossible." Frankly, I'm kinda glad I never got to
meet Mr. Hammond. I don't think we'd have gotten along [laughs].
Don Ellis had a record called Electric Bath, and on that record
he used an Echoplex a lot, playing his horn through it. That gave
me a lot of ideas. I used to get the Echoplex to echo in tempo.
2. Jumping forward to today, how do you go about choosing material?
There's a lot of tunes I've really liked over the years, especially
jazz standards. I figure if I like 'em, most people will like 'em.
I do write, but I don't really think of myself as a composer. I'm
more of an interpreter of other people's stuff. I like to just take
tunes and monkey with them until I come up with something new and
different. "Willow Weep for Me" is a good example of that.
When I do it live I usually explain to people that it's a lovely
old sad song, with sad lyrics, and after a while I got tired of
playing it that way. So I thought I'd really put some tempo into
it, you know? But then I thought if I sang those sad lyrics it'd
be kinda contradictory. So I said, "To hell with the lyrics!
I'll just play it as an uptempo instrumental." Now a lot of
guys wouldn't do that. I've actually bumped the tempo up more since
the recording, and I jokingly re-titled the tune "Willard Wait
for Me." People seem to like it. I like to play music that
makes people's heads bob and their feet tap without them even realizing
they're doing it. If I look out into the audience and I see people
doing that, I know I'm doing my job.
"Somewhere Over the Rainbow" is an interesting exception.
Ilyas Mohammed had a little nightclub here in Nashville called Cafe
Unique. He's an accomplished jazz pianist himself. He invited me
to play at his club several times, in fact that was where I met
Groove Holmes. Mohammed would usually sit in on piano while I was
playing organ. He handwrote out a little chord chart of "Rainbow"
one night and we played it. All these years later I still have that
chart, and when it came time to record, I pulled it out. So the
version on the record is my interpretation of his interpretation.
3. You've played with a lot of the greats. How have you had
time?
I didn't know I was going to play with a lot of those folks until
it happened. One place a lot of that happened...there was this little
hole in the wall called the Grapevine Cafe near Vanderbilt University.
It was a cool little bar where all the Vandy students would come
to drink themselves silly. All kinds of people came and sat in.
Bela Fleck came in with his banjo, Tommy Tutone came in all the
time and played with us. So we had these makeshift bands. Hiram
Bullock came in one night and played with us. You never knew who
was gonna come in. We never made any money there, but we sure had
a good time playing together, sharing styles and ideas.
4. Many organ players have to either cart their own B-3 around
everywhere they go or else throw themselves at the mercy of the
promoter, hoping they'll provide one. How do you deal with it?
When I can't use a B-3, I have a smaller rig I can set up in different
ways. I have a Roland JV-90 and a Voce V5 for trio gigs on small
stages, and if I'm playing with a bass player, I use a Roland AX-1
strap-on controller. Actually I have three of them. Two are for
parts [laughs]. That rig sets up in ten minutes and takes up no
more space than a guitarist's or bass player's. And it's fun. I
guess a lot of keyboard players can't play those things [strap-on
controllers] and maybe that's why they don't make them anymore.
But it's really natural for me to play two-handed on one. Keyboard
players come up to me all the time and say, "How can you do
that?" It's no trouble for me at all. When I can use the B-3,
often I'll run it through two Motion Sound KBR-3D amps, and put
the JV-90 on top, connected to a whole rack full of modules. That's
only when I have the budget to have somebody help me with it.
5. What's the key to making a living as a musician?
Take the gig.
— Ken Hughs
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