Electronic musical instrument was designed to be a lower-cost alternative to a pipe organ for church music, musicians soon discovered that the Hammond was an excellent instrument for blues and jazz; indeed, an entire genre of music developed built around this instrument, known as the organ trio (typically Hammond organ, drums, and a third instrument, either saxophone or guitar). The first commercially manufactured synthesizer was the Novachord, built by the Hammond Organ Company from 1938 to 1942, which offered 72-note polyphony using 12 oscillators driving monostable-based divide-down circuits, basic envelope control and resonant low-pass filters. The instrument featured 163 vacuum tubes and weighed
Gene Williams (musician) Gene Williams (musician) Eugene "Gene" Williams was an American jazz vocalist and bandleader. Williams began his career in 1942 as a member of the Duke Ambassadors under Sammy Fletcher, then worked in Johnny Long's orchestra while serving in the United States Army. After the war he sang with Vincent Lopez and worked with Les Elgart, George Paxton, and Bobby Sherwood; he also sang on the recording "Sorta Kinda" made by the Claude Thornhill Orchestra in 1947. He founded his own band, Gene Williams and the Junior Thornhill Band, in New York City in 1949; he later simplified the name to