Shelton Lasker

[Joe_Kasper@avid.com]

Hi,

For anyone in the Springfield Mass area, I can recommend a jazz concert
coming up with an *excellent* Hammond player named Shelton
Lasker.

His jazz trio "Unity" will be opening for "Pieces of a Dream" at a place
called the "Hooky Low" (I'm not sure of the spelling) in Springfield on
June 24th. There are two shows, 7:30 and 10:00.

Pieces of a Dream used to be Grover Washington's band and they are
evidently really good. 

Unity consists of Shelton Lasker on Hammond C3, a sax and drummer.
Shelton is a black 53 old jazz organist who grew up playing in church.
He has strong gospel roots and is an accomplished jazz musician. 

Shelton and Greg (the sax player) are in another band together called
the Art Steele Blues band. In that band Shelton plays a Roland keyboard
with a Vintage Keys module. He plays his C3 in Unity. He keeps the C3 at
his Church.

I've known Greg for several years and he introduced me to Shelton about
a year ago. I took a couple of jazz lessons from him on a small Ensoniq
keyboard and he said that someday he'd come over to my "crib" and
show me how to play my B3. Well, he came over last Saturday and flipped
me out!

I'm adding some impressions of his style below. 

Expression pedal: hardly ever in a constant position. He does alot of
pulling off quickly from full volume. BTW, he added a Lesley switch to
his foot pedal. Its like a little angle bracket on the right hand side
that lets him just push over with his foot slightly to kick on/off the
Lesley.

Drawbars upper: B flat set: 888800008
                B set:      888400000 soft perc, fast, third harmonic
         lower: B set:      848300000

For the lower manual he mainly uses the B set drawbars. Besides giving a
good sound for a walking bass it makes a great sound for chords when he
drops down from the upper manual.

He jumps between the upper and lower keyboards a lot with the right
hand. Besides giving emphasis to the upper manual, he drops down and
"hits" chords a lot to add accents. A lot of time he doesn't even play a
real chord when he drops down. He might hit like E,G,A,C just to give an
accent sound - he calls it making the organ cough.

So, there you have it! If anyone wants to do reviews of other Hammond
player techniques I'd love to read them!

Joe