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And while Tom Caselli exchanged notes from his Hammond B3 organ with the trumpet of Dave Ellis, the saxophone of Michael Parker, the guitar of Norm Wolfe and the drums and cymbals of Tim Gilmore, the patrons on the dance floor of the Salt hill Pub in Lebanon answered the band’s funky rendition of jazz composer Charles Earland’s 1969 Black Talk with their feet, swaying right down to the last sigh of the B3.
“It was the first time we’d played it together,” Caselli, a Cornish resident, recalled a few weeks later. “It was so cool. We looked at each other at the end of the tune, and you could tell the audience really loved it. There was this really infectious groove.”
The magnet that drew this group of seasoned players together is an uncommon sight on Upper Valley stages. The Hammond B3 calls for a particular kind of devotion.
Caselli fell for the sound that composers and performers such as Earland, Jimmy Smith, Dr. Lonnie Smith and Grant Green (His Majesty King Funk) were playing and recording while Caselli was growing up on Long Island and going to shows in New York City in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Eventually the Hammond B3 lured him away from his first love, the drums.
“It’s an earthy, soulful sound, whether it’s straight R&B, rock ’n’ roll or jazz,” Caselli said. “It’s very diverse. … It has such a colorful, rich, full sound, and at the same time it kind of screams.”
A few years ago, Caselli brought a portable B3 (“The full-size one I have at home is portable if you’re 19 years old and have a bunch of roadies to move it,” he said) to one of Wolfe and Parker’s regular gigs at the Quechee Inn at Marshland Farm.
“They got the idea and they really enjoyed it,” Caselli said. “Norm kept saying, ‘We should try to get something together with the Hammond organ.’ ”
Before they formalized the Brotherhood, Caselli wanted to find a drummer and a trumpeter. Eventually he enlisted Tim Gilmore, who drums for a variety of ensembles for more than 250 dates a year, and David Ellis, who, aside from his day job as co-owner of Ellis Music in Bethel, plays trumpet for the Vermont Jazz Ensemble, Sol Food, The Party Crashers, Soulfix and several jazz quartets and quintets.
“Playing with the organ is a lot of fun,” Ellis wrote during an exchange of emails last week. “The texture and sound of it is different and full. You can sometimes sound like a whole horn section. … The songs are fairly simple harmonically for a jazz player so it did not take long to learn them. The trick is to get the right feel happening.”
The Brotherhood has been groovy enough over the last year, while resisting the temptation to resort to a vocalist, for Salt hill Pub co-owner Josh Tuohy to welcome the band back for a fifth monthly gig this Friday night at 8 at the Lebanon venue — and for as many more times as they want to share the funk and share the noise.
“Our late-night pub crowd can be wildly different from one night to the next, so we don’t always see a ton of guests who are actually seeking out a jazz-heavy, B3 organ sound, let alone a band that plays mostly instrumentals,” Tuohy said last week. “But no matter the crowd, we’ve seen that if people pay attention, they end up sticking around.”
As long as the audiences stick around, so will the brothers — the five regulars as well as occasional stand-ins from their Upper Valley network of fellow musicians.
“It’s been a lot of fun,” said Wolfe, a Hartford resident who taught music and directed high school bands in the Upper Valley for more than 40 years before retiring in 2015. “It gets a little tighter each time we play. I’ve actually been surprised, not having a vocalist, not being a rock band, at the reception we’ve gotten at these shows. People have been very enthusiastic.”
Parker, who leads the dance band Soulfix, wasn’t sure how much enthusiasm to expect when he joined the Brotherhood.
“When I started Soulfix last year, it originally started with no singer,” said Parker, who lives in Royalton. “But for weddings and for shows in bigger venues, we found that you really need the singer. … And yet at these (Brotherhood) shows, people get up and dance. Afterward I ask, ‘How do you like it?’ and they say, ‘It’s really groovy. It’s a fresh sound.’”
For Gilmore, who played with organists Ellis Hall of Tower of Power and John Medeski of Medeski Martin & Wood when he lived in Boston, it didn’t take long to find that feel with the experienced members of the Brotherhood.
“I enjoy playing with any combination of instruments, organ included, if the musicians are good listeners and have a strong sense of dialogue in their playing,” Gilmore wrote in an email last week. “That is what jazz and all forms of improvisational music is based on — good listening.”
Parker in particular enjoys playing a more jazz-oriented repertoire built around a Hammond B3.
“I got my degree in jazz performance in college, and when I got out I was focusing strictly on straight-ahead jazz, with no interest in rock ‘n’ roll,” recalled Parker, of Royalton. “But as soon as I graduated, I needed to make money, so I was in a wedding band, and spent 15 years playing mostly rock music. … I mostly play with guitar players. There’s a lot of space for me to play my sax lines in between. With the Hammond, the notes are constantly there. I can’t play the same ideas I usually play. It’s challenging for me to come up with new ideas, which is good. When I go back to rock ’n’ roll, I have new ideas for my other gigs.”
While other commitments mostly prevent the Brotherhood from rehearsing before shows, Wolfe does practice with Caselli before the band hits the stage.
“Tom is from Long Island and I’m from northern Vermont, so culturally we’re very different,” Wolfe said. “I grew up listening to Booker T and the MGs, Three Dog Night, groups like that. Tom was more with these other people. When we got really serious about this, I had to learn a whole new repertoire. The melodies I needed to learn, you’ve got to pull them all off by ear. But it’s good for me. If you’re serious about guitar, you never stop learning.”
The same goes for Caselli and the Hammond, which features two 61-note keyboards, built-in vibrato and percussion effects, and a dizzying array of tone wheels, spinning magnets and drawbars, all run through a complicated speaker system.
“It’s always an experiment,” Caselli said. “You keep playing with it until you figure out what combination of things you can do.”
The experiment of performing without a singer so far is working out. “The key was finding the right guys, guys with a good reputation,” Caselli said. “It’s hard to get a foot in the door if you don’t have a reference like that.”
The Brotherhood had Salt hill’s Josh Tuohy at “hello.”
“These are real-deal, top-shelf players,” Tuohy said. “Not many bands around here are doing what they do anymore. … If you’re looking for this sound, these guys will blow you away. If you’re not, they’ll still lay down a great soundtrack to whatever else you’re doing on a Friday or Saturday night. We’ll definitely keep bringing them back.”
The B3 Brotherhood performs at the Salt hill Pub in Lebanon on Friday night starting at 8.
David Corriveau can be reached at dcorriveau@vnews.com or 603-727-3207.