Joey DeFrancesco

DeFrancesco has such a command of the jazz organ that you may not even notice that he's only being backed up by a drummer (Byron Landham) and co-soloing with a tenor saxophonist (Jerry Weldon). Joey's fluid bop style is intricate enough to measure up to Jimmy Smith's more experimental sessions and he's also deft at cutting things down to single, sharp lines. But he's also classy enough to just hang back and lay a bed under Weldon's tenor solos. "Class act" pretty much describes DeFrancesco, who is playing a new kind of organ – the easily portable Diversi.