Jon Lord - in memoriam

So, the legendary Jon Lord has passed on at the tender age of 71. I never met him, but I saw him perform live enough times to know that the recordings he laid down for posterity were a true reflection of his awesome talent.

I'm writing this while the DVD of the original 1969 Concerto for Group & Orchestra plays in the background - the perfect example of the worlds that Jon Lord straddles. Has he gone to join the great rock band in the sky, or the great orchestra in the sky? I suspect he's gone to shake things up a bit and get them all playing together instead!

I know the media is generally populist by nature, so all the obituaries are highlighting Smoke On The Water and the 'big' albums Machine Head and Deep Purple In Rock. It seems such a shame to reduce Jon Lord's talent and musical gift to being a co-writer of the track with 'that' riff, brilliant as it may be. That was Ritchie Blackmore's territory. Yes, Lord's ferocious and idiosyncratic playing revolutionised the role of the Hammond organ in the fledgling arena of rock / metal music, and he was the perfect foil to balance the brilliance of Blackmore on the other side of the stage in those early years. I think the world of music owes him a debt for that. Check out the way he rocks his organ and makes pure noise, both melodic and fitting within the context of the performance. Early live tracks such as Mandrake Root, Wring That Neck, Lazy and Speed King wouldn't have half the brilliance or excitement if it was only Ritchie Blackmore playing.

I stumbled upon Deep Purple as an early teen listening to rock music and looking for something more worthwhile than the over-produced MTV cock-rock of Bon Jovi, Def Leppard or Whitesnake. I found Led Zeppelin, which lead me to Deep Purple as contemporaries. I was also back-tracking a bit from Rainbow and Whitesnake and found Deep Purple again that way. My best mate had their limp 1988 live album Nobody's Perfect which sounded OK but didn't really shake our world. Then my dad bought a CD player and I decided to get something to play on it and the compilation 24 Carat Purple was a good price at the time. This was a mixture of early studio and live material and it really blew me away - particularly Speed King and the 1972 Japanese live versions of Smoke On The Water and Black Night. I was hooked. I loved Blackmore's virtuoso guitar and Gillan's powerful vocals. As I've got older I've grown to appreciate Jon Lord's contribution much more.

What has kept me faithful to Purple over the years is that on the whole I've enjoyed the other work that the band members have done outside of the group. The Purple 'family', if you will. Not so much Ian Gillan, I'll admit. Jon Lord's solo work outside of the group I've found to be the most mature, engaging and enjoyable. I'm not a fan of the work he did with Tony Ashton immediately post-Purple, but his years with Whitesnake showed a great discipline in a band much more rigidly controlled than Purple had been and he was instrumental (pun unavoidable) in their blues-rock sound before David Geffen got his hands on Coverdale's crotch and sent it Stateside to get glossy.

Lord's major contribution, and his eventual reason for leaving Deep Purple in 2002, is his classical work as both performer and composer. This is some of the music I value the most and, I suspect, was the work he was the most proud of.
There were dabbles in the late 60s with the Concerto and some of the early Purple album tracks have orchestral sections - check out Anthem on The Book of Taleisyn (1968) and April on Deep Purple (1969) which are both brilliant. (While you're at it, check out Blind on Deep Purple, a fabulous Lord solo-penned track with a great harpsichord sound.) I appreciate that after this time Purple were aiming at a full bodied rock / metal sound but it's a shame they didn't keep some of the variety these early albums show.
In the 70s we get The Gemini Suite (which nearly blew Deep Purple apart at the time) and some solo projects from Lord with 1974's Windows and the follow-up Sarabande (1975) - all good grounding for his return to the genre in the late 90s and onwards with Pictured Within (1999),  Beyond The Notes (2004), The Durham Concerto (2007), Boom of the Tingling Strings (2008) and To Notice Such Things (2010). Most recently he's been working on a studio version of his original Concerto For Group and Orchestra. Already having two live versions of this (1969 & 1999) I doubt I'll rush out to get this; I haven't picked up the re-released studio version of The Gemini Suite either. The 1970 Purple live version is gorgeous enough, if understated. I'm a fan, but I can't afford to be a completist collector!

It's difficult for anyone with a major commercial contribution to the music industry to be remembered for anything more than that. I only hope that the more specialised media obituaries pay due respect to the wonderful classical work he has created, and remember that when he led Deep Purple down the Concerto path in 1969 it wasn't done as a gimmick, but as a real experiment. Many bands have done it since and many have done it as a fad or publicity stunt. The Concerto and the original Gemini Suite at the very least stand as major compositions of artistic integrity and major contributions to Twentieth Century music.

Many will mourn the fact that we'll never see Deep Purple MkII or MkIII reformed now. An era of possibility has ended. But we have what we have recorded for posterity.

Thank you Jon Lord, may your music live on forever.