JON HAMMOND Band

Jon Hammond plays Hammond B3 organ, accordion, piano and guitar. Born in Chicago in 1953, he moved to Berkeley in 1957, started accordion at nine and was working by twelve. As a teenager he played organ in San Francisco rock bands, including a four-piece called Hades that shared rehearsal space with Quicksilver Messenger Service, and did a few early gigs with a young Eddie Money. He went to Berklee in Boston in the early 1970s and attended City College of San Francisco.

The band that carries his name has never had a fixed roster; the profile listed Jon Hammond plus all-star musicians, with influences from the Crusaders and Cannonball Adderley to Sons of Champlin and Tower of Power. The signature record, Late Rent, was cut at Intergalactic in New York with Todd Anderson on tenor, Barry Finnerty on guitar and Steve Ferrone on drums; Hammond spent his rent money to make it, hence the title. The profile also listed Hammond's Bolero and the NDR Sessions Projekt.

Hammond gave his hometown as New York and San Francisco, and that was accurate. He hosted The Jon Hammond Show on Manhattan public-access cable from 1984, and in the mid-2000s he was on Bay Area air as host of HammondCast, a daily CBS program on KYOU and KYCY 1550 AM at 4 AM. The profile was tagged jazz, funk and soul; its one shout-out welcomed him to the site and praised the guitar work in the posted video.

Local gigs on record include a Late Rent Session Men trio opening for Sons of Champlin at the Fillmore Auditorium in June 1999, and a Shoreline Amphitheatre set at the New Orleans by the Bay festival with Larry Schneider, James Preston and Barry Finnerty. He has been a fixture at the Frankfurt Musikmesse for decades and long kept a base in Hamburg.