The organist Reuben Wilson, who helped usher in soul jazz, has died at 88: Video, Photos

Few are the folks who could cast a literal shadow over the iconic Hammond B-3 organ, nicknamed “the Beast” by many of the jazz musicians who have helmed the hefty 425 lb. instrument.

But Reuben Wilson — who died on May 26 at the age of 88 — was one such organist. When he perched his athletic 6 ft. 5 inch frame behind the dual-manual keyboard, quick hands and size 15 feet sparring with the drawbars, pedals and electromagnetic tonewheels housed in a wooden box that could be mistaken for living room furniture — it didn’t seem so big after all. The funk-ridden grooves of his music could feel larger than life, however, particularly those he created for Blue Note Records in the late 1960s and early ’70s. These landmark LPs provided his peers with “a groovy situation,” (as one album was titled), and would inspire acid jazz DJs and hip-hop luminaries worldwide a generation later.

Wilson’s death was confirmed by his son, Reuben Reuel Wilson. After battling dementia the last several years, and recently being diagnosed with advanced lung cancer, he died in Harlem.

“Reuben Wilson helped usher in what we now call Soul Jazz,” says Pete Fallico, founder of the Jazz Organ Fellowship Hall of Fame, an organization dedicated to honoring the history of jazz organ, and into which Wilson was inducted in 2013. “And in the ’90s, his music was revitalized when English DJs like Giles Petersen started playing all these old funky tunes he had recorded decades earlier.”

Born April 9, 1935, in the tiny town of Mounds, Okla., Reuben Lincoln Wilson was the second youngest of thirteen siblings. When Reuben was five, Dust Bowl conditions forced the family westward to Pasadena, Calif., where his father Amos worked odd jobs and his mother Elizabeth was a domestic worker. As a teen, Wilson tinkered on the home piano. He loved the boogie-woogie sounds the delivery guys would stick around to play after dropping off ice for the family’s ice box, and was further piqued after a visit to the house by rising pianist Sonny Clark.

But music was second-string to his love for hitting people. He earned All-City football honors playing defensive end, and gravitated to the ring as a professional heavyweight boxer, becoming a sparring partner of future champ, Floyd Patterson. “Kirk Douglas was my sponsor,” Wilson told me in a 2004 interview. “I knocked a lot of guys out.” His relationship with the Hollywood star landed him the role of the knocked out boxer in Carmen Jones, the 1954 film featuring Harry Belafonte and Dorothy Dandridge. “After I moved to New York years later,” Wilson recounted, “every time I ran into Harry he’d put his dukes up and say, ‘Alright, man, let’s go!'”

As a leader, Wilson performed well into his seventies, and recorded at least 17 full-length albums, their artwork showcasing his infectious smile. “Reuben was exceptional and had everything together,” says his longtime collaborator Bernard Purdie in a phone interview. “I never saw him play a regular piano, but he played the hell out of the organ.”

He is predeceased by his first wife, singer Faye Emma Smith Wilson; survived by their son, musician Roderick Wilson; by his second wife, Daphne and their son, musician Reuben Wilson.

“The organ will tell on you quicker than any instrument I know,” Wilson told me once. “When you sit down to play that bad boy, however you feel — that’s exactly the way it’s gonna come out.”