1965 · Album
Con-Soul & Sax
Recorded 1965 · RCA Victor · Featured Musicians: Johnny Hodges (saxophone), Wild Bill Davis (organ)
When the Saxophone Met the Console
Hodges and Davis locked into a groove that sounds like late-night conversation between old friends.
Walk into this session and you hear something warm and unhurried — Johnny Hodges' soprano and alto saxophones floating over the deep, churning harmonies of a console organ. Wild Bill Davis isn't just comping behind the horn; he's creating a full landscape of sound, those big manuals breathing beneath Hodges' phrasing like a second musician entirely. The tempo stays deliberate and soulful, the mood conversational. This is small-group swing-meets-soul-jazz, recorded in 1965 when Hodges was in his sixties and still had no shortage of ideas.
The album's title is clever — a play on "console organ" and "con soul" — but the pun doesn't oversell what's actually happening musically. Davis played both Hammond B-3 and C-3 organs, and both are console instruments with those two 61-note manuals and pedal boards. The richness of that setup matters; it's not a pop organ or a tiny portable rig. Hodges and Davis worked with the fullness of what the instrument could do, and the result feels substantial without ever sounding overstuffed.
This sits squarely in Hodges' later catalog — not a reinvention or a peak, but solid work from someone who'd already done nearly everything worth doing in jazz. If you know his Ellington sides or his earlier work, you already understand what he brings. This is a good place to hear him paired with an organist who knows how to listen and respond, playing music that doesn't demand your attention so much as reward it if you give it.
