More than Patriotism: Jelani Eddington Plays Great Theatre Organ Program in Balboa Park July 1

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Monday, July 1) my husband Charles and I went to the Spreckels Organ Pavilion in Balboa Park to see and hear the holiday concert presented by organist Jelani Eddington, who has an unusual background. He was born in Muncie, Indiana and trained to be an attorney. Eddington’s start in music occurred when his grandmother started teaching him piano at age 4. At age 8 he went to a pizza parlor that featured a pipe organ and he was mesmerized. “Unlike most pipe organs, this particular instrument was installed in a way that you could see many of the organ’s working parts,” Eddington recalled. “I was fascinated that one person could control all of the facets and sounds of the instrument, and I decided in that moment that I wanted to learn to play one.” Eddington moved to New York City shortly after he graduated from law school, but in 2003 he relocated to Milwaukee mainly because he thought he’d have more opportunities there as a musician. He spent six years from 2003 to 2009 playing music full-time and then joined a law firm in Milwaukee and split his time between the two careers. Eddington has played the Spreckels Organ Pavilion at least twice before and he’s their usual go-to guy for the last Monday night concert before the Fourth of July, where he regularly plays a medley of all (or almost all) the Armed Forces service songs.

Among the martial selections he played were the service songs – the Army, Marines, Navy, Coast Guard and Air Force, in that order (note that he didn’t play the anthem for Donald Trump’s rump Space Force – there is one and I’ve heard it on one of the PBS Memorial Day concert telecasts – and, as Charles noted, he didn’t play the one for the Merchant Marine either, though the Merchant Marine hasn’t really been a “thing” since World War II) – and three familiar marches, John Philip Sousa’s “The Stars and Stripes Forever” (the closing work on the program, though he did play an encore – more on that later) and “Washington Post March,” and Edwin Eugene Bagley’s “National Emblem March” (which incorporates the opening lick of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” a.k.a. “To Anacreon in Heaven,” but treats it in a different and unusual way). Eddington also played three pieces by light-classical composer Leroy Anderson, whose first name was for some reason spelled “Leroi” on the program (the Christmas song “Sleigh Ride” was originally his melody, though the lyrics were added later): “Jazz Pizzicato,” “Jazz Legato” and “The Captains and the Kings.” He explained that “Jazz Pizzicato” was originally recorded by Anderson’s orchestra for one side of a 78 rpm record, and they needed something for the flip side so he wrote “Jazz Legato” on the spot at the recording studio. The moment he started that anecdote I couldn’t help but wonder how many people in the audience even knew what a “78” was! (I actually owned a few 78’s as a child; Charles didn’t, but he knew the speed existed because when he was growing up his family had a phonograph with a 78 rpm speed setting as well as ones for the more familiar 33’s and 45’s.)

Eddington opened the concert with Franz Schubert’s “Marche Militaire,” and his encore was Charles-Marie Widor’s famous Toccata finale from his Organ Symphony No. 5. It’s nice to know he can play music by major classical composers on occasion! Along with those numbers he did a medley of themes from the James Bond movies, starting and finishing with John Barry’s iconic “James Bond Theme” and including the main title songs from From Russia with Love, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, For Your Eyes Only, Goldfinger (which for some odd reason he played as a tango!), Live and Let Die and Tomorrow Never Dies. Then he played a couple of pieces he’d performed on his CD Phoenix Renaissance, which I bought at the concert last night from his merch table: Stephen Sondheim’s “Send In the Clowns” and “Fanfare” by Richard Purvis, long-time organist at San Francisco’s Grace Cathedral. Eddington said Purvis composed “Fanfare” as a processional for weddings, though he played it so fast I had visions of brides scampering down the church’s aisles to make it to the altar in time. After that he played the Armed Forces medley and segued into a version of Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America.” Then he did the “Washington Post March,” Leroy Anderson’s “The Captains and the Kings” (during which both Charles and I heard an annoying electronic whine over part of the music) and the one piece Eddington played out of the order on the printed program, an arrangement (his own? The program didn’t say) of the beautiful classic American folk song “Shenandoah.”

Then he did a medley of George Gershwin themes by Chris Gorsuch, a leader in the theatre organ world where Eddington has his roots, that cleverly combined bits of four Gershwin songs (“S’Wonderful,” “Love Is Here to Stay,” “They Can’t Take That Away from Me” and “I Got Rhythm”) with snippets from some of Gershwin’s “classical” concert works: the Concerto in F (mostly the second and third movements), An American in Paris, the inevitable Rhapsody in Blue and the lesser-known Cuban Overture. He closed the concert with “The Stars and Stripes Forever” and the Charles-Marie Widor Toccata, the closing movement from his Organ Symphony No. 5. This morning I’ve been playing the Eddington CD Phoenix Renaissance and I’m both impressed and a bit puzzled by the closing selection, a complete performance of Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2 with Eddington’s organ reduction of the orchestral part and a piano soloist. I’m not sure who the pianist is, but there’s an ambiguous reference in the CD’s liner notes to Eddington recording the organ part and playing it back via a computer relay, which makes me think that Eddington played the piano, too, using overdubbing to record the piano part “live” while playing the organ part back via those computerized relays. The notes did say he recruited fellow theatre organist Russ Peck to play certain percussion instruments in the concerto, and that Chris Gorsuch, arranger of his Gershwin medley, was involved in the disc’s production.