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 Krupa witness, John Pateakos had been paid to testify falsely against Krupa. Pateakos returned to prove that he wasn't a minor, that he had dodged the draft, and that he had been instructed by federal agents to leave after the first conviction. He recanted his earlier testimony. In the early 1970s Krupa's house in Yonkers, New York, was damaged by fire. He continued to live in the parts of the house that were habitable. In 1973, Krupa died in Yonkers at the age 64 from heart failure, though he also had leukemia and emphysema. He was buried in Holy Cross Cemetery