Blues organist Jimmy McGriff dies at 72

Jimmy McGriff, the acclaimed blues organist, who scored his first hit in the 1960s with an instrumental arrangement of “I’ve Got A Woman,” then continued to record hard swinging grooves that appealed to audiences across musical boundaries, died Saturday at a nursing home in New Jersey. He was 72.

The cause of death was not known but was believed to be heart failure, said his wife, Margaret McGriff. Jimmy McGriff was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis many years ago.

Although sometimes described as a jazz organist, McGriff considered himself a bluesman; the blues was what he felt when he played and what distinguished his music from other greats of the organ.

“Jimmy Smith is the jazz king on the organ, but when it comes to blues, I can do things where he can’t touch me,” McGriff once said.

In a 2000 Los Angeles Times article, jazz writer Don Heckman described McGriff’s concert performance with saxophonist Hank Crawford and others as “an impressive display of the depth and power of the blues.”

McGriff’s “rich-textured organ timbres creating a roiling undercurrent of rhythm. At climactic points they gathered to generate tsunami-like waves of energy before breaking off into sudden, dramatic moments of silence,” Heckman wrote.

Born April 3, 1936, in Philadelphia, McGriff’s love of the organ began when he was a boy. Both his parents played piano and by the age of 5 McGriff was playing. Later he learned the saxophone and the bass, but the sound of the organ captured his attention. With the encouragement of his father he switched from piano to organ.

“He was hearing something I wasn’t hearing,” McGriff said in a 2006 interview posted on the Web site, All About Jazz. “He told me to play the organ, because I had that gospel thing.”

McGriff trained at Julliard and the Combe College of Music in Philadelphia and also took private lessons from Smith and another legendary organist, Richard “Groove” Holmes. The music of Count Basie, whom he met, also influenced McGriff.

“It was big band music. And I liked that big band kinda thing. That’s what turned me on,” McGriff said in the 2006 All About Jazz interview. “(Basie) was the father of Harlem musicians. He wouldn’t teach you nothing wrong. If you did something wrong, the changes I would play, he would just say, “That’s wrong. You don’t wanna do that.’ … I liked that.”

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