Tony Thomas is one of a select group of largely unsung Memphis virtuosos who’ve served as the backbone of the local music scene since the ’70s. Thus you’ll see him pop up on a lot of record credits through the decades, on releases by U2, Joe Walsh, and the like. Lovers of Memphis indie-rock lore will know that he formed one third of the Dog Police (with his usual go-to team of Sam Shoup and Tom Lonardo), who achieved a kind of meteoric MTV stardom in 1982 with their video of a song of the same name.
Or, you may have heard him playing piano with those same accomplices over the years. Hearing him on the organ, though, is another matter, aside from sitting in with Elizabeth King’s Sacred Soul Sound Section, or (my favorite) the recordings he made with Herman Green, Calvin Newborn, and Samurai Celestial in the ’90s, released under Green’s name.
As Thomas says, “I’ve had a lot of really good people behind me with the piano trio all these years, great players and a lot of really great moments. But I’ve always been an organ player that plays piano.”
But what an organ player! Thomas has been both playing and dealing in organs for decades (he sold me a small Hammond at AMRO thirty-odd years ago), and knows them inside-out. Sometimes he can be heard behind a theater organ, like the Orpheum Theatre’s restored 1928 Mighty Wurlitzer, featured on his album A Very Mighty Christmas. That’s quite a different beast than a Hammond B3, the preferred model of soul, gospel, and jazz players. And the latter was what he happened to be playing when Grammy-winning producer/engineer Matt Ross-Spang chanced to hear him.
“Imagine my surprise,” says Thomas, “when Matt said he had heard me play some jazz organ and he wanted to produce me! I was just in shock.” Paradoxically, it was a moment he’d prepared for his whole life. “This is something I’ve always wanted to do,” he says, “but I never found the time.”
Time having duly been found, the result was a batch of tracks by a fresh band, Tony Thomas Three, that could sit neatly with any in the annals of classic organ trio jazz. Recorded live to analog tape at Ross-Spang’s Southern Grooves studio, the trio’s debut album, Get With This!, is a raw statement of the Memphis groove played with utter ease by three seasoned jazz masters. And as such, it’s a sound that’s not emerged out of Memphis for a very long time.
In making the album, Thomas wanted to start fresh. “I’ve been playing here so long, and I’ve played with just about everybody, so it was really hard for me to make choices on this matter,” says Thomas. “I didn’t really know what direction to go. So I kind of threw the ball to Matt. ‘Who do you know who can play a broad variety of things and bring something different?’
“Well, he didn’t know that I had played a few times with [guitarist] Charlton Johnson, but he suggested Charlton. And Matt also suggested Kenny Coomer, who he’s used a lot in his independent record productions, so he knows what kind of a musician he is. And there’s nothing really I can put my finger on [about the group], except the chemistry. And I was sort of a stranger to these guys, as opposed to anybody else I could have used in the group, who would have done wonderful work. But they’ve all known me for 45 years, right? We were really trying to go in a different direction.”
That direction is indeed different, yet very lived in, given that Thomas has been playing the Hammond for most of his life. Johnson and Coomer, too, are similarly seasoned, with Johnson alternating between perfect comping and boss, bluesy solos.
“He played with Count Basie, man!” says Thomas of Johnson. “He was eight years on the road with the Basie band, or something like that. He was only the third guy since Freddie Green died to get that chair.”
This weekend, the trio will be celebrating the album’s release in style with a concert in The Green Room at Crosstown Arts this Saturday, September 20th, at 7:30 p.m. (There’s also an album debut event at the Memphis Listening Lab on Friday, September 19th, at 6 p.m.)
The album is doubly significant as the first release under Ross-Spang’s Southern Grooves imprint. “I’m just so grateful to have an expert like that producing me,” says Thomas. “It’s been a whirlwind and a very cool thing. And the album is by no means slick. It was a clean sweep, just me out there communicating with two other musicians who did not really know what to expect. Matt said it best: ‘What you’re hearing is discovery, not repetition.'”
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