Album Notes

This is quite the accidental album. I often record my performances for archival purposes these days; sometimes off the mixing board, sometimes with a handheld recorder. On this occasion, my friend and ace sound engineer Sunil Kumar brought a nice recording rig for the gig to record what was only meant to be a high quality archival recording. He digitally recorded the performance onto 2-track stereo.

When I listened back to the recording, I realized that the music was really grooving and that there was high integrity in the audio quality of the recording. So after some careful mastering by my long-time friend and audio engineer John Herbert, I am so happy to present “Groovin’ At Groove Junction”, the debut album of my organ trio; Organamix.

Although my primary instrument is the piano, I also spent many of my early years learning how to play and how to teach the Hammond Organ. However, it became difficult to lug around the combined weight of approximately 250 kg of the Hammond organ and its accompanying Leslie speaker.

For years I had yearned to return to playing the organ again and kept hoping that someone would come up with the technology to faithfully reproduce the sound of the Hammond tone-wheel organ and Leslie rotating speaker in a lighter package.

Over the years, many companies, including Hammond themselves have come up with what is now known as the “clone-wheel” organs.

On this recording, I am playing my favorite of this new generation of organs; the Nord C1 that faithfully reproduces the sound of both the original tone-wheel organ and Leslie speaker, produced by the very advanced sound modeling techniques of the maker Clavia. And, the organ plus amplifier in their flight cases weigh only 50 kg, making it easy for me nowadays to tour with the organ.

Together with my two younger and very talented colleagues, Singaporean guitarist Andrew Lim and Thai drummer Chanutr Techatana-nan (known to his friends as Hong), I am very happy to present this; my 26th album as a leader and our first together as Organamix.

Enjoy!
Jeremy Monteiro (leader of Organamix)