Leon Spencer
I grew up in the Tri State area, which is the hotbed of the legendary Hammond Organ players. Along with Larry Young and Lee Micheals, Leon Spencer is my favorite organist. I got to meet all of them but Larry Young, I met Lee Michaels under relatively bizarre circumstances, but that’s another story.
Larry Young is famous for Coltrane/McCoy improv concepts on organ but he didn’t record any funk. Leon incorporated some crazy McCoy Tyner 4ths & 5ths into the funk. I met Leon Spencer when he was playing at a house party 2 houses down. In 1968, I was 12 and just starting out to practice seriously. I was into Hendrix, Cream, and Tull.
One day I heard a band warming up very close by. I saw these guys setting up to jam on a big piece of plywood 2 doors down in Piscataway NJ. They were playing a benefit because my neighbor’s house burnt down. He was a medical doctor from Dublin who had a clinic in Newark and helped folks Leon knew, so they held benefit concerts to rebuild his house.
They played James Brown and Kool in the Gang covers but then went on to extended solos. I am talking 15 minutes each song. Each player had a lot of time to develop ideas over a drone. In between they played standards, but the focus was this new style of "funk jazz" which was the basis for what later morphed into "smooth jazz". It was created mainly in the Tri-State area. They set up a big piece of plywood right in front of the burnt ruins, the pool was unscathed., so folk were swimming. This was my first glimpse into this type of funk/jazz improvising live.
This meeting motivated me to seek out the LP's he was on and to this day I still listen to his solo LP's and his incredible solos on Melvin Spark's "Sparkplug" and Sonny Stitt's "Black Vibrations"
Then 5 years later when Ozzie Cadena Ozzie Cadena opened his record store in New Brunswick he had Saturday afternoon gigs where Leon would play once a month; I lived 3 blocks away so I was there every Saturday and got to meet and watch live my favorite organist again on multiple occasions. He passed in 2012 at age 67.
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Cool story. Damn 67 seems young, now that I'm 66.