Seattle Jazz Outfit Delvon Lamarr Organ Trio Visits the Ritz Theatre on Saturday

Cold As Weiss is the third studio album by the Delvon Lamarr Organ Trio, released last year. The group will be performing at The Ritz on February 4, a stacked evening for live music in Northeast Florida. Their first album, Close But No Cigar (2015), scored the #1 spot on Billboard’s Contemporary Jazz Albums chart. 

There are also two live albums, one of which captured the group’s name-making session for KEXP in May 2017. All five official album releases were put out on their self-produced Colemine label, as were their eight singles, all of which are products of just the past seven years. 

Lamarr plays the iconic Hammond B-3 organ, but he’s a self-taught prodigy who plays a variety of instruments. Guitarist Miles “Smiles” Harris and drummer Ehssan “Ace” Karimi join Lamarr for the performance at The Ritz. The DLO3 comes from a long line of jazz organ trios, a genre defined most prominently by the late great Jimmy Smith, a core member of the Blue Note crew throughout the 1960s. There’s also Hampton Hawes, Richard “Groove” Holmes, Eddy Louiss and the recently departed stylistic torch-bearer Joey DeFrancesco. 

The Lamarr style is not as heavy, eschewing the typically dense left-hand chords for a more holistically melodic approach. They’re not here to show off their chops, but to play actual cohesive songs, leaning more toward blues, soul and funk than traditional jazz. They are more likely to sample than to be sampled, but you should sample their style this Saturday at The Ritz.