Alex Jones Will Play One of World’s Largest Theater Organs

Alex Jones. Photo provided.

A hundred years ago, many Americans heard a pipe organ twice a week. On Sunday morning the church organ accompanied their hymn singing. And on Saturday night, they enjoyed the Mighty Wurlitzer theater organ that provided music for a silent film or vaudeville show at the local movie palace.

The invention of movies with their own sound tracks in the 1930s silenced many American theater organs. But enthusiasm for these massive instruments remains, and local organist Dr. Alex Jones will introduce this piece of American’s cultural heritage at a free concert on Sunday, Nov. 9. Jones is director of music and liturgy at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in downtown Milwaukee.

Jones will play one of the largest theater organs in the world: a four-manual, 90-rank instrument with about 6,500 pipes. (A bit of organ vocabulary: A rank is a set of pipes that make one particular sound. A stop is turned on and off by the organist to send air to a rank of pipes.) It was installed in Franklin in what Jones calls “the world’s largest private music room”: a warehouse owned by Carma Labs, the company that makes Carmex lip balm. The nucleus of the instrument is a Wurlitzer pipe organ originally built for a Chicago movie theater. Since acquiring the Wurlitzer, Carma Labs president Paul Woelbing has overseen its expansion to include parts from some 50 dismantled organs.

Theater organs imitate the music of an orchestra. Pipes crafted of various metals and wood, ranging in length from 32 feet to just a few inches, create the sounds of strings, woodwinds and brass instruments. The organs also incorporate actual percussion instruments like drums, marimbas, and even pianos. The organist controls all these inputs from a horseshoe-shaped console, playing on multiple keyboards and a full range of pedals played with the feet. Because it’s nearly impossible to activate so many individual stops during performance, the organist sets up combinations (groups of stops) in advance. Jones says that much of his five-hour practice sessions is spent establishing the combinations he will use in concert.

Jones plans a program of 20^th century American songs and jazz standards, including pieces associated with icons like Percy Faith, Frank Sinatra, Scott Joplin, and Duke Ellington. Like many organists, Jones creates his own lush symphonic arrangements, because “there isn’t a great corpus of music that has been committed to paper” for organs. At Sunday’s concert, Jones will talk with the audience about the instrument, and show off even more of its capabilities by playing excerpts from Igor Stravinsky’s devilishly difficult classic, The Firebird.

The Dairyland Theatre Organ Society is sponsoring Sunday’s free concert, which begins at 2 p.m. at the Carma Labs warehouse, 9750 S. Franklin Dr., Franklin. No tickets are required; people are advised to bring a lawn chair in case chairs fill up. Jones encourages people to “come early, grab a seat, and discover this sound world that is part of American performance history.”