brian felix organ quartet

When Brian Felix sits behind a Hammond B3, something curious happens: the ghost of Jimmy Smith nods approvingly while Jimmy McGriff's ghost mutters "yeah, but can he fix the Leslie when it breaks?" Felix spent his formative years studying piano with Kenny Barron at Rutgers—which is a bit like learning carpentry from a master craftsman and then deciding to become a plumber. Different instrument, same devotion to the craft, equally likely to involve fixing things that leak. After cutting his teeth in the relentless touring circus of OM Trio (sharing stages with everyone from Tower of Power to Umphrey's McGee, which is basically jazz education via trial by fire and funk), Felix took the scenic route through graduate school, earning a doctorate while pondering the eternal question: "What happens when rock becomes jazz?" The answer, it turns out, involves a lot of drawbars, a Leslie speaker that weighs more than most relationships, and the kind of bass pedal work that makes your chiropractor wince. Now a professor at UNC Asheville—where he teaches everything from jazz theory to the Grateful Dead, because academic versatility is just a fancy term for "willing to talk about music until everyone else leaves the room"—Felix leads his organ trio with the understanding that the best music happens when you stop trying to impress people and start trying to make them feel something. His left hand walks bass lines, his right hand builds harmonic cathedrals, and somewhere in between, gospel church pews start swaying in jazz clubs. This isn't nostalgia. This is a guy with a doctorate, two kids, and a very patient wife, proving that organ jazz still has something to say—even if that something occasionally requires an extension cord, a backup fuse, and a sense of humor about the whole enterprise.