Jackie Davis

about

Jackie Davis was the first musician to popularize jazz on the Hammond organ, years before Jimmy Smith's name became synonymous with organ jazz. Davis was Capitol's leading performer on the organ at a time when relatively few mainstream labels were willing to put a black musician on the cover of an album. Davis once said that music came to him genetically. His mother played the washtub, a cheap substitute for the bass, and he first learned to play by spending hours poking at his grandmother's piano. By the age of eight, he was playing with a local dance band. The rest of the band had ten years or more on him, and he later remarked that he had "eighteen godfathers who kept their pedal extremities in sensitive areas of my anatomy." He later described the experience as his best education in music and in life. By the age of eleven, he'd earned enough from playing to buy his own piano, and music enabled him to pay his way through Florida A&M College, where he graduated with a bachelors degree in music in 1943. After serving time in the Army, he worked as a pianist, usually as an accompanist for singers such as Dinah Washington, Sarah Vaughan, and Billy Daniels. Although he was attracted to the organ, he was intimidated at the prospect of playing jazz on it, particularly when his idol at the time was the lightning-fast Art Tatum. But when the Hammond Organ Company began selling electric organs in the late 1940s, he felt the biggest technical hurdle had been overcome, and in 1951,

top songs

albums

Easy Does It

Hammond Gone Cha-Cha

Ultra-Lounge, Vol. 2: Mambo Fever

Ultra-Lounge / Mambo Fever Volume Two

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Ultra-Lounge / Fuzzy Retail Sampler

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Ultra-Lounge / Mambo Fever Volume Two

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Ultra Lounge

Blues in the Night (One Mint Julip Lounge 1959)

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Ultra-Lounge Sampler

Hammond Organ Classics

Ultra-Lounge, Vol. 11: Organs in Orbit

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Ultra-Lounge Vol. 2: Mambo Fever

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